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CARRY ON 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

THE GARDEN WITHOUT WALLS 

THE RAFT 

SLAVES OF FREEDOM 

FLORENCE ON A CERTAIN NIGHT 
AND OTHER POEMS 




LIEUTENANT CONINGSBY DAWSON 

CANADIAN FIELD ARTILLERY 



CARRY ON 

LETTERS IN WAR-TIME 



BY , 

CONINGSBY DAWSON 

NOVELIST ANd'sOLDIER 



WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES 

BY HIS FATHER, W. J. DAWSON 



FRONTISPIECE 



NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY 
LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD 
TORONTO: S. B. GUNDY V '.• MCMXVIII 






Copyright, 191 7, 
By John Lane Coisumv 



u ■«•'** i ' 



WHEN THE WAR'S AT AN END 

At length when the war's at an end 
And we're just ourselves, — you and I, 

And we gather our lives up to mend, 
We, who've learned how to live and to die: 

Shall we think of the old ambition 

For riches, or how to grow wise, 
When, like Lazarus freshly arisen, 

We've the presence of Death in our eyes'? 

Shall we dream of our old life's passion, — 

To toil for our heart's desire. 
Whose souls War has taken to fashion 

With molten death and with fire f 

I think we sitall crave the laughter 

Of the wind through trees gold with the sun. 

When our strife is all finished, — after 
The carnage of War is done. 

Just these things will then seem worth while: — 
Eono to make Life more wondrously sweet; 

Eow to live with a song and a smile, 
Haw to lay our lives at Love's feet. 

Emc p. Dawson, 
Sub. Lieut. R. N. V. R. 



INTRODUCTION 

THE letters in this volume were not written 
for publication. They are intimate and 
personal in a high degree. They would not now 
be published by those to whom they are ad- 
dressed, had they not come to feel that tlie spirit 
and temper of the writer might do something to 
strengthen and invigorate those who, like him- 
self, are called on to make great sacrifices for 
high causes and solemn duties. 

They do not profess to give any new informa- 
tion about the military operations of the Allies; 
this is the task of the publicist, and at all times 
is forbidden to the soldier in the field. Here and 
there some striking or significant fact has been 
allowed to pass the censor; but the value of the 
letters does not lie in these things. It is found 
rather in the record of how the dreadful yet 
heroic realities of war affect an unusually sensi- 
tive mind, long trained in moral and romantic 
idealism; the process by which this mind adapts 
itself to unanticipated and incredible conditions, 
to acts and duties which lie close to horror, and 
are only saved from being horrible by the efficacy 

I 



8 INTRODUCTION 

of the spiritual effort which they evoke. Hating 
the brutalities of War, clearly perceiving the 
wide range of its cruelties, yet the heart of the 
writer is never hardened by its daily commerce 
with death; it is purified by pity and terror, by 
heroism and sacrifice, until the whole nature 
seems fresh annealed into a finer strength. 

The intimate nature of these letters makes it 
necessary to say something about the writer. 

Coningsby Dawson graduated with honours in 
history from Oxford in 1905, and in the same 
year came to the United States with the intention 
of taking a theological course at Union Sem- 
inary. After a year at the Seminary he reached 
the conclusion that his true lifework lay in liter- 
ature, and he at once began to fit himself for his 
vocation. In the meantime his family left Eng- 
land, and we had made our home in Taunton, 
Massachusetts. Here, in a quiet house, amid 
lawns and leafy elms, he gave himself with inde- 
fatigable ardour to the art of writing. He wrote 
from seven to ten hours a day, producing many 
poems, short stories, and three novels. Few 
writers have ever worked harder to attain liter- 
ary excellence, or have practised a more austere 
devotion to their art. I often marvelled how a 
young man, fresh from a brilliant career at the 
greatest of English Universities, could be content 



INTRODUCTION <| 

with a life that was so widely separated from 
association with men and affairs. I wondered 
still more at the patience with which he endured 
the rebuffs that always await the beginner in 
literature, and the humility with which he was 
willing to learn the hard lessons of his appren- 
ticeship in literary form. The secret lay, no 
doubt, in his secure sense of a vocation, and his 
belief that good work could not fail in the end 
to justify itself. But, not the less, these four 
years of obscure drudgery wore upon his spirit, 
and hence some of the references in these letters 
to his days of self -despising. The period of 
waiting came to an end at last with the publica- 
tion in 1913 of his Garden Without Walls, 
which attained immediate success. When he 
speaks in these letters of his brief burst of fame, 
he refers to those crowded months in the Fall of 
1913, when his novel was being discussed on 
every hand, and, for the first time, he met many 
writers of established reputation as an equal. 

Another novel. The Raft, followed The 
Garden Without Walls. The nature of his life 
now seemed fixed. To the task of novel-writing 
he had brought a temperament highly idealistic 
and romantic, a fresh and vivid imagination, and 
a thorough literary equipment. His life, as he 
planned it, held but one purpose for him, outside 



lo INTRODUCTION 

the warmth and tenacity of its affections — the 
triumph of the efficient purpose in the adequate 
expression of his taind in literature. The aus- 
terity of his long years of preparation had left 
him relatively indifferent to the common prizes 
of life, though they had done nothing to lessen 
his intense joy in life. His whole mind was con- 
centrated on his art. His adventures would be 
the adventures of the mind in search of ampler 
modes of expression. His crusades would be the 
crusades of the spirit in search of the realities 
of truth. He had received the public recognition 
which gave him faith in himself and faith in his 
ability to achieve the reputation of the true artist, 
whose work is not cheapened but dignified and 
broadened by success. So he read the future, 
and so his critics read it for him. And then, 
sudden and unheralded, there broke on this quiet 
life of intellectual devotion the great storm of 
1 914, The guns that roared along the Marne 
shattered all his purposes, and left him face to 
face with a solemn spiritual exigency which ad- 
mitted no equivocation. 

At first, in common with multitudes more ex- 
perienced than himself, he did not fully compre- 
hend the true measure of the cataclysm which 
had overwhelmed the world. There had been 
wars before, and they had been fought out by 



INTRODUCTION ii 

standing armies. It was incredible that any war 
should last more than a few months. Again and 
again the world had been assured that war would 
break down with its own weight, that no war 
could be financed beyond a certain brief period, 
that the very nature of modern warfare, with its 
terrible engines of destruction, made swift de- 
cisions a necessity. The conception of a British 
War which involved the entire manhood of the 
nation was new, and unparalleled in past history. 
And the further conception of a war so vast in 
its issues that it really threatened the very exist- 
ence of the nation was new too. Alarmists had 
sometimes predicted these things, but they had 
been disbelieved. Historians had used such 
phrases of long past struggles, but often as a 
mode of rhetoric rather than as the expression 
of exact truth. Yet, in a very few weeks, it 
became evident that not alone England, but the 
entire fabric of liberal civilisation was threat- 
ened by a power that knew no honour, no re- 
straints of either caution or magnanimity, no 
ethic but the armed might that trampled under 
blood-stained feet all the things which the com- 
mon sanction of centuries held dearest and fair- 
est. 

Perhaps, if Coningsby had been resident in 
England, these realities of the situation would 



12 INTRODUCTION 

have been immediately apparent. Residing in 
America, the real outHnes of the struggle were 
a little dimmed by distance. Nevertheless, from 
the very first he saw clearly where his duty lay. 
He could not enlist immediately. He was bound 
in honour to fulfil various literary obligations. 
His latest book. Slaves of Freedom, was in 
process of being adapted for serial use, and its 
publication would follow. He set the completion 
of this work as the period when he must enlist; 
working on with difficult self-restraint toward 
the appointed hour. If he had regrets for a 
career broken at the very point where it had 
reached success and was assured of more than 
competence, he never expressed them. His one 
regret was the effect of his enlistment on those 
most closely bound to him by affections which 
had been deepened and made more tender by the 
sense of common exile. At last the hour came 
when he was free to follow the imperative call 
of patriotic duty. He went to Ottawa, saw Sir 
Sam Hughes, and was offered a commission in 
the Canadian Field Artillery on the completion 
of his training at the Royal Military College, at 
Kingston, Ontario. The last weeks of his train- 
ing were passed at the military camp of Pete- 
wawa on the Ottawa River. There his family 
was able to meet him in the July of 1916. While 



INTRODUCTION 13 

we were with him he was selected, with twenty- 
four other officers, for immediate service in 
France; and at the same time his two younger 
brothers enHsted in the Naval Patrol, then being 
recruited in Canada by Commander Armstrong. 

The letters in this volume commence with his 
departure from Ottawa. Week by week they 
have come, with occasional interruptions; mud- 
stained epistles, written in pencil, in dug-outs by 
the light of a single candle, in the brief moments 
snatched from hard and perilous duties. They 
give no hint of where he was on the far-flung 
battle-line. We know now that he was at Albert, 
at Thiepval, at Courcelette, and at the taking of 
the Regina trench, where, unknown to him, one 
of his cousins fell in the heroic charge of the 
Canadian infantry. His constant thoughtfulness 
for those who were left at home is manifest in 
all he writes. It has been expressed also in other 
ways, dear and precious to remember: in flowers 
delivered by his order from the battlefield each 
Sabbath morning at our house in Newark, in 
cables of birthday congratulations, which arrived 
on the exact date. Nothing has been forgotten 
that could alleviate the loneliness of our separa- 
tion, or stimulate our courage, or make us con- 
scious of the unbroken bond of love. 

The general point of view in these letters is, I 



INTRODUCTION 

think, adequately expressed in the phrase *^Carry 
On" which I have used as the title of this book. 
It was our happy lot to meet Coningsby in Lon- 
don in the January of the present year, when he 
was granted ten days' leave. In the course of 
conversation one night he laid emphasis on the 
fact that he, and those who served with him, 
were, after all, not professional soldiers, but 
civilians at war. They did not love war, and 
when the war was ended not five per cent of them 
would remain in the army. They were men 
who had left professions and vocations which 
still engaged the best parts of their minds, and 
would return to them when the hour came. War 
was for them an occupation, not a vocation. Yet 
they had proved themselves, one and all, splen- 
did soldiers, bearing the greatest hardships with- 
out complaint, and facing wounds and death with 
a gay courage which had made the Canadian 
forces famous even among a host of men, equally 
brave and heroic. The secret of their fortitude 
lay in the one brief phrase, "Carry On." Their 
fortitude was of the spirit rather than the nerves. 
They were aware of the solemn ideals of justice, 
liberty, and righteousness for which they fought, 
and would never give up till they were won. In 
the completeness of their surrender to a great 
cause they had been lifted out of themselves to 



INTRODUCTION 15- 

a new plane of living by the transformation of 
their spirit. It was the dogged indomitable drive 
of spiritual forces controlling bodily forces. Liv- 
ing or dying those forces would prevail. They 
would carry on to the end, however long the war, 
and would count no sacrifice too great to assure 
its triumph. 

This is the spirit which breathes through these 
letters. The splendour of war, as my son puts 
it, is in nothing external; it is all in the souls of 
the men. "There's a marvellous grandeur about 
all this carnage and desolation — men's souls rise 
above the distress — they have to, in order to sur- 
vive." "Every man I have met out here has the 
amazing guts to wear his crown of thorns as 
though it were a cap-and-bells." They have 
shredded off their weaknesses, and attained that 
"corporate stout-heartedness" which is "the acme 
of what Aristotle meant by virtue." For himself, 
he discovers that the plague of his former modes 
of life lay in self -distrust. It was the disease of 
the age. The doubt of many things which it were 
wisdom to believe had ended in the doubt of one's 
own capacity for heroism. All those doubts and 
self-despisings had vanished in the supreme sur- 
render to sacrificial duty. The doors of the 
Kingdom of Heroism were flung so wide that the 
meanest might enter in, and in that act the 



i6 INTRODUCTION 

humblest became comrades of Drake's men, who 
could jest as they died. No one knows his real 
strength till it is put to the test; the highest joy 
of life is to discover that the soul can meet the 
test, and survive it. 

The Somme battlefield, from which all these 
letters were despatched, is an Inferno much more 
terrible than any Dante pictured. It is a vast 
sea of mud, full of the unburied dead, pitted and 
pock-marked by shell-holes, treeless and house- 
less, "the abomination of desolation." And the 
men who toil across it look more like outcasts 
of the London Embankment than soldiers. 
"They're loaded down like pack-animals, their 
shoulders are rounded, they're wearied to death, 
but they go on and go on. . . . There's no flash 
of sword or splendour of uniforms. They're only 
very tired men determined to carry on. The war 
will be won by tired men who can never again 
pass an insurance test." Yet they carry on — the 
"broken counter-jumper, the ragged ex-plumber," 
the clerk from the office, the man from the farm ; 
Londoner, Canadian, Australian, New Zealander, 
men drawn from every quarter of the Empire, 
v/ho daily justify their manhood by devotion to 
an ideal and by contempt of death. And in the 
heart of each there is a settled conviction 
that the cause for which they have sacrificed so 



INTRODUCTION 17, 

much must triumph. They have no illusions 
about an early peace. They see their comrades 
fall, and say quietly, "He's gone West." They do 
heroic things daily, which in a lesser war would 
have won the Victoria Cross, but in this war are 
commonplaces. They know themselves re-bom 
in soul, and are dimly aware that the world is 
travailing toward new birth with them. They 
are still very human, men who end their letters 
with a row of crosses which stand for kisses. 
They are not dehumanised by war ; the kindliness 
and tenderness of their natures are unspoiled by 
all their daily traffic in horror. But they have 
won their souls ; and when the days of peace re- 
turn these men will take with them to the 
civilian life a tonic strength and nobleness which 
will arrest and extirpate the decadence of society 
with the saving salt of valour and of faith. 

It may be said also that they do not hate their 
foe, although they hate the things for which he 
fights. They are fighting a clean fight, with men 
whose courage they respect. A German prisoner 
who comes into the British camp is sure of good 
treatment. He is neither starved nor insulted. 
His captors share with him cheerfully their ra- 
tions and their little luxuries. Sometimes a sul- 
len brute will spit in the face of his captor when 
he offers him a cigarette; he is always an officer. 



l8 INTRODUCTION 

never a private. And occasionally between these 
fighting hosts there are acts of magnanimity 
which stand out illumined against the dark back- 
ground of death and sufifering. One of the 
stories told me by my son illustrates this. Dur- 
ing one fierce engagement a British officer saw a 
German officer impaled on the barbed wire, 
writhing in anguish. The fire was dreadful, yet 
he still hung there unscathed. At length the 
British officer could stand it no longer. He said 
quietly, *T can't bear to look at that poor chap 
any longer." So he went out under the hail of 
shell, released him, took him on his shoulders and 
carried him to the German trench. The firing 
ceased. Both sides watched the act with wonder. 
Then the Commander in the German trench came 
forward, took from his own bosom the Iron 
Cross, and pinned it on the breast of the British 
officer. Such an episode is true to the holiest 
ideals of chivalry ; and it is all the more welcome 
because the German record is stained by so many 
acts of barbarism, which the world cannot for- 
give. 

This magnanimous attitude toward the enemy 
is very apparent in these letters. The man 
whose mind is filled with great ideals of sacrifice 
and duty has no room for the narrowness of 
hate. He can pity a foe whose sufferings ex- 



INTRODUCTION 19 

ceed his own, and the more so because he knows 
that his foe is doomed. The British troops do 
know this to-day by many infalhble signs. In 
the early days of the war untrained men, poorly 
equipped with guns, were pitted against the best 
trained troops in Europe. The first Canadian 
armies were sacrificed, as was that immortal 
army of Imperial troops who saved the day at 
Mons. The Canadians often perished in that 
early fighting by the excess of their own reck- 
less bravery. They are still the most daring 
fighters in the British army, but they have 
profited by the hard discipline of the past. They 
know now that they have not only the will to 
conquer, but the means of conquest. Their ar- 
tillery has become conspicuous for its efficiency. 
It is the ceaseless artillery fire which has turned 
the issue of the war for the British forces. The 
work of the infantry is beyond praise. They "go 
over the top" with superb courage, and all who 
have seen them are ready to say with my son, 
"I'm hats off to the infantry." And in this final 
efficiency, surpassing all that could have been 
thought possible in the earlier stages of the war, 
the British forces read the clear augury of vic- 
tory. The war will be won by the Allied armies; 
not only because they fight for the better cause, 
which counts for much, in spite of Napoleon's 



BO INTRODUCTION 

cynical saying that "God is on the side of the 
strongest battahons"; but because at last they 
have superiority in equipment, discipline and effi- 
ciency. Upon that shell-torn Western front, 
amid the mud and carnage of the Somme, there 
has been slowly forged the weapon which will 
drive the Teuton enemy across the Rhine, and 
give back to Europe and the world unhindered 
liberty and enduring peace. 

W. J. Dawson. 
March, 191 7. 



THE LETTERS 

In order to make some of the allusions in these 
letters clear I will set down briefly the circum- 
stances which explain them, and supply a narra- 
tive link where it may be required, 

I have already mentioned the Military Camp 
at Petewawa, on the Ottawa river. The Camp 
is situated about seven miles from Pembroke. 
The Ottawa river is at this point a beautiful 
lake. Immediately opposite the Camp is a little 
summer hotel of the simplest description. It 
was at this hotel that my wife, my daughter, and 
myself stayed in the early days of July, 191 6. 

The hotel was full of the wives of the officers 
stationed in the Camp. During the daytime I 
was the only man among the guests. About five 
o'clock in the afternoon the officers from the 
Camp began to arrive on a primitive motor ferry- 
boat. My son came over each day, and we often 
visited him at the Camp. His long training at 
Kingston had been very severe. It included be- 
sides the various classes which he attended a great 
deal of hard exercise, long rides or foot marches 
over frozen roads before breakfast, and so forth. 



22 THE LETTERS 

After this strenuous winter the Camp at Pete- 
wawa was a dehghtful change. His tent stood 
on a bluff, commanding an exquisite view of the 
broad stretch of water, diversified by many small 
islands. We had a great deal of swimming in 
the lake, and several motor-boat excursions to 
its beautiful upper reaches. One afternoon 
when we went over in our launch to meet him 
at the Camp wharf, he told us that that day a 
General had come from Ottawa to ask for 
twenty-five picked officers to supply the casu- 
alties among the Canadian Field Artillery at the 
front. He had immediately volunteered and 
been accepted. 

At this time my two younger sons, who had 
joined us at Petewawa in order to see their 
brother, enrolled themselves in the Royal Naval 
Motor Patrol Service, and had to return to Nel- 
son, British Columbia, to settle their affairs. 
Near Nelson, on the Kootenay Lake, we have a 
large fruit ranch, managed by my second son, 
Reginald, My youngest son, Eric, was with a 
law-firm in Nelson, and had just passed his final 
examinations as solicitor and barrister. 

This ranch had played a great part in our 
lives. The scenery is among the finest in Brit- 
ish Columbia. We usually spent our summers 
there, finding not only continual interest in the 



THE LETTERS 23 

development of our orchards, but a great deal of 
pleasure in riding, swimming, and boating. We 
had often talked of building a modern house 
there, but had never done so. The original "lit- 
tle shack" was the work of RegiUfild's own 
hands, in the days when most of the ranch was 
primeval forest. It had been added to, but was 
still of the simplest description. One reason 
why we had not built a modern house was that 
this "little shack" had become much endeared to 
us by association and memory. We were all to- 
gether there more than once, and Coningsby 
had written a great deal there. We built later 
on a sort of summer library — a big room on the 
edge of a beautiful ravine — to which reference 
is made in later letters. Some of the happiest 
days of our lives were spent in these lovely sur- 
roundings, and the memory of those blue sum- 
mer days, amid the fragrance of miles of pine- 
forest, often recurs to Coningsby as he writes 
from the mud-wastes of the Somme. 

We left Petewawa to go to the ranch before 
Coningsby sailed for England, that we might 
get our other two sons ready for their journey 
to England. They left us on August 21st, and 
the ranch was sub-let to Chinamen in the t"^ 
of September, when we returned to Newark, 
New Jersey. 



CARRY ON 



Ottawa, July i6th, 1916. 
Dearest All: 

So much has happened since last I saw you 
that it's difficult to know where to start. On 
Thursday, after lunch, I got the news that we 
were to entrain from Petewawa next Friday 
morning. I at once put in for leave to go to 
Ottawa the next day until the following Thurs- 
day at reveille. We came here with a lot of the 
other officers who are going over and have been 
having a very full time. 

I am sailing from a port unknown on board 
the Olympic with 6,000 troops — there is to be a 
big convoy. I feel more than ever I did — and 
I'm sure it's a feeling that you share since visit- 
ing the camp — that I am setting out on a Cru- 
sade from which it would have been impossible 
to withhold myself with honour. I go quite 
gladly and contentedly, and pray that in God's 
good time we may all sit again in the little shack 
at Kootenay and listen to the rustling of the or- 

25 



26 CARRY ON 

chard outside. It will be of those summer days 
that I shall be thinking all the time. 

Yours, with very much love. 

Con. 

II 

Halifax, July 23rd. 

My Dear Ones : 

We've spent all morning on the dock, see- 
ing to our baggage, and have just got leave 
ashore for two hours. We have had letters 
handed to us saying that on no account are we 
to mention anything concerning our passage over- 
seas, neither are we allowed to cable our arrival 
from the other side until four clear days have 
elapsed. 

You are thinking of me this quiet Sunday 
morning at the ranch, and I of you. And I am 
wishing As I wish, I stop and ask my- 
self, "Would I be there if I could have my 
choice?" And I remember those lines of Emer- 
son's which you quoted : 

"Though love repine and reason chafe. 
There comes a voice without reply, 
'Twere man's perdition to be safe, 
When for the Truth he ought to die." 

I wouldn't turn back if I could, but my heart 
cries out against "the voice which speaks with- 
out reply." 



CARRY ON 27 

Things are growing deeper with me in all sorts 
of ways. Family affections stand out so de- 
sirably and vivid, like meadows green after rain. 
And religion means more. The love of a few- 
dear human people and the love of the divine 
people out of sight, are all that one has to lean 
on in the graver hours of life. I hope I come 
back again — I very much hope I come back 
again ; there are so many finer things that I could 
do with the rest of my days — bigger things. But 
if by any chance I should cross the seas to stay, 
you'll know that that also will be right and as big 
as anything that I could do with life, and some- 
thing that you'll be able to be just as proud 
about as if I had lived to fulfil all your other 
dear hopes for me. I don't suppose I shall talk 
of this again. But I wanted you to know that 
underneath all the lightness and ambition there's 
something that I learnt years ago in Highbury. * 
I've become a little child again in God's hands, 
with full confidence in His love and wisdom, and 
a growing trust that whatever He decides for me 
will be best and kindest. 

This is the last letter I shall be able to send 
to you before the other boys follow me. Keep 

*We resided over thirteen years at Highbury, London, 
N., during my pastorate of the Highbury Quadrant Con- 
gregational Church. 



25 CARRY ON 

brave, dear ones, for all our sakes ; don't let any 
of us turn cowards whatever ultimately hap- 
pens. We've a tradition to live up to now that 
we have become a family of soldiers and sailors. 

I shall long for the time when you come over 
to England. Where will our meeting be and 
when ? Perhaps the war may be ended and then 
won't you be glad that we dared all this sorrow 
of good-byes? 

God bless and keep you. 



III 



Con. 



On Board, 

July 27th, 1916. 



My Very Dear People : 

Here we are scooting along across the 
same old Atlantic we've crossed so many times 
on journeys of pleasure. I'm at a loss to make 
my letters interesting, as we are allowed to say 
little concerning the voyage and everything is 
censored. 

There are men on board who are going back 
to the trenches for the second time. One of 
them is a captain in the Princess Pat's, who is 
badly scarred in his neck and cheek and thighs, 
and has been in Canada recuperating. There is 
also a young flying chap who has also seen ser- 



CARRY ON 29 

vice. They are all such boys and so plucky in 
the face of certain knowledge. 

This morning I woke up thinking of our mo- 
tor-tour of two years ago in England, and es- 
pecially of our first evening at The Three Cups 
in Dorset. I feel like running down there to 
see it all again if I get any leave on landing. 
How strange it will be to go back to Highbury 
again like this! The little boy who ran back 
and forth to school down Paradise Row lit- 
tle thought of the person who to-day masquer- 
ades as his elder self. 

Heigho! I wish I could tell you a lot of 
things that I'm not allowed to. This letter 
would be much more interesting then. 

In seventeen days the boys will also have left 
you — so this will arrive when you're horribly 
lonely. I'm so sorry for you dear people — but 
I'd be sorrier for you if we were all with you. 
If I were a father or mother, I'd rather have 
my sons dead than see them failing when the 
supreme sacrifice was called for. I marvel all 
the time at the prosaic and even coarse types of 
men who have risen to the greatness of the oc- 
casion. And there's not a man aboard who 
would have chosen the job ahead of him. One 
man here used to pay other people to kill his 
pigs because he couldn't endure the cruelty of 



30 CARRY ON 

doing It himself. And now he's going to kill 
men. And he's a sample. I wonder if there is 
a Lord God of Battles — or is he only an inven- 
tion of man and an excuse for man's own ac- 
tions. 

Monday. 

We are just in — safely arrived in spite of 
everything. I hope you had no scare reports of 
our having been sunk — such reports often get 
about when a big troop ship is on the way. 

I'm baggage master for my draft, and have to 
get on deck now. You'll have a long letter from 
me soon. 

Good-bye, 

Yours ever, 

Con. 

IV 

Shorncliff, August 19th, 1916. 

My Dearests: 

We haven't had any hint of what is going 
to happen to us — whether Field Artillery, the 
Heavies or trench mortars. There seems little 
doubt that we are to be in England for a little 
while taking special courses. 

I read father's letter yesterday. You are very 
brave — ^you never thought that you would be the 
father of a soldier and sailors; and, as you say, 



CARRY ON 31 

there's a kind of tradition about the way in 
which the fathers of soldiers and sailors should 
act. Confess — aren't you more honestly happy 
to be our father as we are now than as we were ? 
I know quite well you are, in spite of the loneli- 
ness and heartache. We've all been forced into 
a heroism of which we did not think ourselves 
capable. We've been carried up to the Calvary 
of the world where it is expedient that a few 
men should suffer that all the generations to 
come may be better. 

I understand in a dim way all that you suffer 
— the sudden divorce of all that we had hoped 
for from the present — the ceaseless questionings 
as to what lies ahead. Your end of the business 
is the worse. For me, I can go forward steadily 
because of the greatness of the glory. I never 
thought to have the chance to suffer in my body 
for other men. The insufficiency of merely set- 
ting nobilities down on paper is finished. How 
unreal I seem to myself! Can it be true that I 
am here and you are in the still aloofness of the 
Rockies? I think the multitude of my changes 
has blunted my perceptions. I trudge along like 
a traveller between high hedgerows ; my heart is 
blinkered so that I am scarcely aware of land- 
scapes. My thoughts are always with you — I 
make calculations for the differences of time that 



32 CARRY ON 

I may follow more accurately your doings. I'd 
love to come down to the study summer-house 
and watch the blueness of the lake with you — 
I love those scenes and memories more than any 
in the world. 

Good-bye for the present. Be brave. 
Yours, 

Con. 



V 

Shorncuff, August 19th, 1916. 

My Dears: 

It's not quite three weeks to-day since I 
came to England, and it seems ages. The first 
week was spent on leave, the second I passed my 
exams in gun drill and gun-laying, and this week 
I have finished my riding. Next Monday I start 
on my gunnery. 

Do you remember Captain S, at the Camp? 
I had his young brother to dinner with me last 
night — he's just back from France minus an 
eye. He lasted three and a half weeks, and was 
buried four feet deep by a shell. He's a jolly 
boy, as cheerful as you could want and is very 
good company. He gave me a vivid description. 
He had a great boy-friend. At the start of the 
war they both joined, S. in the Artillery, his 



CARRY ON 33 

friend in the Mounted RiHes. At parting they 
exchanged identification tokens. S.'s bore his 
initials and the one word "Violets" — which 
meant that they were his favourite flower and he 
would like to have some scattered over him when 
he was buried. His friend wore his initials and 
the words "No flowers by request." It was S.'s 
first week out — they were advancing, having 
driven back the enemy, and were taking up a 
covered position in a wood from which to renew 
their offensive. It was night, black as pitch, but 
they knew that the wood must have been the 
scene of fighting by the scuttling of the rats. 
Suddenly the moon came out, and from beneath 
a bush S. saw a face — or rather half a face — 
which he thought he recognised, gazing up at 
him. He corrects himself when he tells the 
story, and says that it wasn't so much the dis- 
figured features as the profile that struck him as 
familiar. He bent down and searched beneath 
the shirt, and drew out a little metal disc with 
"No flowers by request" written on it. 

I don't know whether I ought to repeat things 
like that to you, but the description was so 
graphic. I have met many who have returned 
from the Front, and what puzzles me in all of 
them is their unawed acceptance of death. I 
don't think I could ever accept it as natural ; it's 



34 CARRY ON 

too discourteous in its interruption of many 
dreams and plans and loves. 

Yours with very much love, 

Con. 

VI 

Shorncliff, August 30th, 1916. 

My Dearests: 

I have just returned from sending you a 
cable to let you know that I'm off to France. 
The word came out in orders yesterday, and I 
shall leave before the end of the week with a 
draft of officers — I have been in England just a 
day over four weeks. My only regret is that I 
shall miss the boys who should be travelling up 
to London about the same time as I am setting 
out for the Front. After I have been there for 
three months I am supposed to get a leave — this 
should be due to me about the beginning of De- 
cember, and you can judge how I shall count on 
it. Think of the meeting with R. and E., and 
the immensity of the joy. 

Selfishly I wish that you were here at this 
moment — actually I'm glad that you are away. 
Everybody goes out quite unemotionally and 
with very few good-byes — we made far more 
fuss in the old days about a week-end visit. 

Now that at last it has come — this privileged 



CARRY ON 35 

moment for which I have worked and waited — 
my heart is very quiet. It's the test of a char- 
acter which I have often doubted. I shall be 
glad not to have to doubt it again. Whatever 
happens, I know you will be glad to remember 
that at a great crisis I tried to play the man, how- 
ever small my qualifications. We have always 
lived so near to one another's affections that this 
going out alone is more lonely to me than to 
most men. I have always had some one near at 
hand with love-blinded eyes to see my faults as 
springing from higher motives. Now I reach 
out my hands across six thousand miles and only 
touch yours with my imagination to say good- 
bye. What queer sights these eyes, which have 
been almost your eyes, will witness ! If my hands 
do anything respectable, remember that it is your 
hands that are doing it. It is your influence as 
a family that has made me ready for the part I 
have to play, and where I go, you follow me. 

Poor little circle of three loving persons, 
please be tremendously brave. Don't let any- 
thing turn you into cowards — we've all got to 
be worthy of each other's sacrifice; the greater 
the sacrifice may prove to be for the one the 
greater the nobility demanded of the remainder. 
How idle the words sound, and yet they will take 
deep meanings when time has given them graver 



36 CARRY ON 

sanctions. I think gallant is the word I've been 
trying to find — we must be gallant English 
women and gentlemen. 

It's been raining all day and I got very wet 
this morning. Don't you wish I had caught some 
quite harmless sickness? When I didn't want to 
go back to school, I used to wet my socks pur- 
posely in order to catch cold, but the cold always 
avoided me when I wanted it badly. How far 
away the childish past seems — almost as though 
it never happened. And was I really the bud- 
ding novelist in New York? Life has become 
so stern and scarlet — and so brave. From my 
window I look out on the English Channel, a 
cold, grey-green sea, with rain driving across it 
and a fleet of small craft taking shelter. Over 
there beyond the curtain of mist lies France — 
and everything that awaits me. 

News has just come that I have to start. Will 
continue from France. 

Yours ever lovingly, 

Con. 

VII 

Friday, September ist, 1916, 11 a.m. 
Dearest Father and Mother : 

I embark at 12.30 — so this is the last line 
before I reach France. I expect the boys are 



CARRY ON 37 

now within sight of English shores — I wish I 
could have had an hour with them. 

I'm going to do my best to bring you honour 
— remember that — I shall do things for your 
sake out there, living up to the standards you 
have taught me. 

Yours with a heart full of love, 

Con. 

VIII 

France, September 1st, 1916. 

Dearest M. : 

Here I am in France with the same 
strange smells and street cries, and almost the 
same little boys bowling hoops over the very 
cobbly cobble stones. I had afternoon tea at a 
patisserie and ate a great many gateaux for the 
sake of old times. We had a very choppy cross- 
ing, and you would most certainly have been 
sick had you been on board. It seemed to me 
that I must be coming on one of those romantic 
holidays to see churches and dead history — only 
the khaki-clad figures reminded me that I was 
coming to see history in the making. It's a 
funny world that batters us about so. It's three 
years since I was in France — the last time was 
with Arthur in Provence. It's five years since 
you and I did our famous trip together. 



38 CARRY ON 

I wish you were here — there are heaps of Eng- 
lish nurses in the streets. I expect to sleep in 
this place and proceed to my destination to-mor- 
row. How I wish I could send you a really de- 
scriptive letter! If I did, I fear you would not 
get it — so I have to write in generalities. None 
of this seems real — it's a kind of wild pretence 
from which I shall awake — and when I tell you 
my dream you'll laugh and say, "How absurd 
of you, dreaming that you were a soldier. I 
must say you look like it." 

Good-bye, my dearest girl, 

God bless you, 

Con. 

IX 

September 8th, 191 6. 
My Dearest Ones : 

I'm sending this to meet you on your re- 
turn from Kootenay. I left England on Sep- 
tember 1st and had a night at my point of dis- 
embarkation, and then set off on a wandering ad- 
venture in search of my division. I'm sure 
you'll understand that I cannot enter into any 
details — I can only give you general and purely 
personal impressions. There were two other 
officers with me, both from Montreal. We had 
to picnic on chocolate and wine for twenty-four 



CARRY ON 39 

hours through our lack of forethought in not sup- 
plying ourselves with food for the trip, I shaved 
the first morning v^ith water from the exhaust 
of a railroad engine, having first balanced my 
mirror on the step. The engineer was fascinated 
with my safety razor. There were Tommies 
from the trenches in another train, muddied to 
the eyes — who showed themselves much more re- 
sourceful. They cooked themselves quite ad- 
mirable meals as they squatted on the rails, over 
little fires on which they perched tomato cans. 
Sunday evening we saw our first German prison- 
ers — a young and degenerate-looking lot. Sun- 
day evening we got off at a station in the rain, 
and shouldered our own luggage. Our luggage, 
by the way, consists of a sleeping bag, in which 
much of our stuff is packed, and a kit sack — ■ 
for an immediate change and toilet articles one 
carries a haversack hung across the shoulder. 
Well, as I say, we alighted and coaxed a military 
wagon to come to our rescue. As we set off 
through a drizzling rain, trudging behind the 
cart, a double rainbow shone, which I took for 
an omen. Presently we came to a rest camp, 
where we told our sad story of empty tummies, 
and were put up for the night. A Jock — all 
Highlanders are called Jock — looked after us. 
Next morning we started out afresh in a motor 



40 CARRY ON 

lorry and finished at a Y. M. C. A. tent, where 
we stayed two nights. On Wednesday we met 
the General in Command of our Division, who 
posted me to the battery, which is said to be the 
best in the best brigade in the best division — so 
you may see I'm in luck. I found the battery 
just having come out of action — we expect to go 
back again in a day or two. Major B. is the 
O. C. — a fine man. The lieutenant who shares 
my tent won the Military Cross at Ypres last 
Spring. I'm very happy — which will make you 
happy — and longing for my first taste of real 
war. 

How strangely far away I am from you — all 
the experiences so unshared and different. Long 
before this reaches you I shall have been in ac- 
tion several times. This time three years ago 
my streak of luck came to me and I was pranc- 
ing round New York. To-day I am much more 
genuinely happy in mind, for I feel, as I never 
felt when I was only writing, that I am doing 
something difficult which has no element of self 
in it. If I come back, life will be a much less 
restless affair. 

This letter! I can imagine it being delivered 
and the shout from whoever takes it and the 
comments. I make the contrast in my mind — 
this little lean-to spread of canvas about four 



CARRY ON 41 

feet high, the horse-lines, guns, sentries going up 
and down — and then the dear home and the well- 
loved faces. , 

Good-bye. Don't be at all nen^ous. 
Yours lovingly, 

Con. 



September 12th, Tuesday. 
Dearest M. : 

You will already have received my first 
letters giving you my address over here. The 
wagon has just come up to our position, but it has 
brought me only one letter since I've been across. 
I'm sitting in my dug-out with shells passing over 
my head with the sound of ripping linen. I've 
already had the novel experience of firing a bat- 
tery, and to-morrow I go up to the first line 
trenches. 

It's extraordinary how commonplace war be- 
comes to a man who is thrust among others who 
consider it commonplace, ^'ot fifty yards away 
from me a dead German lies rotting and uncov- 
ered — I daresay he was buried once and then 
blown out by a shell. 

Wednesday, 7 p.m. 

Your letters came two hours ago — the first to 
reach me here— and I have done little else but 



42 CARRY ON 

read and re-read them. How they bring the old 
ways of life back with their love and longing! 
Dear mother's tie will be worn to-morrow, and 
it will be ripping to feel that it was made by her 
hands. Your cross has not arrived yet, dear. 
Your mittens will be jolly for the winter. I've 
heard nothing from the boys yet. 

To-day I took a trip into No-Man's Land — ■ 
when the war is ended I'll be able to tell you all 
about it. I think the picture is photographed 
ufHDn my memory forever. There's so much 
you would like to hear and so little I'm allowed 
to tell. Ask G. M'C. if he was at Princeton with 
a man named Price — an instructor there. 

You ought to see the excitement when the 
water-cart brings us our mail and the letters are 
handed out. Some of the gunners have evident- 
ly told their Canadian girls that they are officers, 
and so they are addressed on their letters as 
lieutenants. I have to censor some of their re- 
plies, and I can tell you they are as often funny 
as pathetic. The ones to their mothers are child- 
ish, too, and have rows of kisses. I think men 
are always kiddies if you look beneath the sur- 
face. The snapshots did fill me with a wanting 
to be with you in Kootenay. But that's not 
where you'll receive this. There'll probably be 
a fire in the sitting-room at home, and a strong 



CARRY ON 43 

aroma of coffee and tobacco. You'll be sitting 
in a low chair before the fire and your fingers 
rubbing the hair above your left ear as you read 
this aloud. I'd like to walk in on you and say, 
"No more need for letters now." Some day 
soon, I pray and expect. 

Tell dear Papa and Mother that their answers 
come next. What a lot of love you each one 
manage to put into your written pages! I'm 
afraid if I let myself go that way I might make 
you unhappy. 

Since writing this far I have had supper. I'm 
now sleeping in a new dug-out and get a shower 
of mould on my sleeping-kit each time the guns 
are fired. One doesn't mind that particularly, 
especially when you know that the earth walls 
make you safe. I have a candle in an old petrol 
tin and dodge the shadows as I write. You 
know, this artillery game is good sport and 
one takes everything as it comes with a joke. 
The men are splendid — their cheeriness comes 
up bubbling whenever the occasion calls for the 
dumps. Certainly there are fine qualities which 
war, despite its unnaturalness, develops. I'm 
hats off to every infantry private I meet now- 
adays. 

God bless you and all of you. 

Yours lovingly, Con. 



44 CARRY ON 

The reference in the previous letter to a 
cross is to a little bronze cross of Francis of 
Assisi. 

Many years ago I visited Assisi, and, on leav- 
ing, the monks gave me four of these small 
bronze crosses, assuring me that those who wore 
them were securely defended in all peril by the 
efficacious prayers of St. Francis. 

Just before Coningsby left Shomcliff to go to 
France he wrote to us and asked if we couldn't 
send him something to hang round his neck for 
luck. We fortunately had one of these crosses 
of St. Francis at the ranch, and his sister — the 
M. of these letters — sent it to him. It arrived 
safely, and he has worn it ever since. 



XI 

September isth, 1916. 

Dear Father: 

Your last letter to me was written on a 
quiet morning in August — in the summer house 
at Kootenay. It came up yesterday evening on a 
water-cart from the wagon-lines to a scene a 
little in contrast. 

It's a fortnight to-day since I left England, 
and already I've seen action. Things move 
quickly in this game, and it is a game — one 



CARRY ON 45 

which brings out both the best and the worst 
qualities in a man. If unconscious heroism is 
the virtue most to be desired, and heroism spiced 
with a strong sense of humour at that, then 
pretty well every man I have met out here has 
the amazing guts to wear his crown of thorns as 
though it were a cap-and-bells. To do that for 
the sake of corporate stout-heartedness is, I think, 
the acme of what Aristotle meant by virtue. A 
strong man, or a good man or a brainless man. 
can walk to meet pain with a smile on his moutli 
because he knows that he is strong enough to 
bear it, or worthy enough to defy it, or because 
he is such a fool that he has no imagination. 
But these chaps are neither particularly strong, 
good, nor brainless; they're more like children, 
utterly casual with regard to trouble, and quite 
aware that it is useless to struggle against their 
elders. So they have the merriest of times while 
they can, and when the governess, Death, sum- 
mons them to bed, they obey her with unsur- 
prised quietness. It sends the mercury of one's 
optimism rising to see the way they do it. I 
search my mind to find the bigness of motive 
which supports them, but it forever evades me. 
These lads are not the kind who philosophise 
about life; they're the sort, many of them, who 
would ordinarily wear corduroys and smoke a 



46 CARR^ ON 

cutty pipe. I suppose the Christian martyrs 
would have done the same had corduroys been 
the fashion in that day, and if a Roman Raleigh 
had discovered tobacco. 

I wrote this about midnight and didn't get any 
further, as I was up till six carrying on and fir- 
ing the battery. After adding another page or 
two I want to get some sleep, as I shall probably 
have to go up to the observation station to watch 
the effect of fire to-night. But before 1 turn in 
I want to tell you that I had the most gorgeous 
mail from everybody. Now that I'm in touch 
with you all again, it's almost like saying "How- 
do?" every night and morning. 

I daresay you'll wonder how it feels to be un- 
der shell-fire. This is how it feels — you don't 
realise your danger until you come to think about 
it afterwards — at the time it's like playing cocoa- 
nut shies at a coon's head — only you're the coon's 
head. You take too much interest in the sport 
of dodging to be afraid. You'll hear the Tom- 
mies saying if one bursts nearly on them, "Line, 
you blighter, line. Five minutes more left," just 
as though they were reprimanding the unseen 
Hun battery for rotten shooting. 

The great word of the Tommies here is "No 
bloody bon" — a strange mixture of French and 
English, which means that a thing is no good- 



CARRY ON 4> 

If it pleases them it's Jake — tliough where Jake 
comes from nobody knows. 

Now I must get a wink or two, as I don't 
know when I may have to start off. 
Ever yours, with love, 

Con. 

XII 

September 19th, 1916. 
Dearest Mother: 

I've been in France 19 days, and it hasn't 
taken me long to go into action. Soon I shall 
be quite an old hand. I'm just back from 24 
hours in the Observ^ation Post, from which one 
watches the effect of fire. I understand now and 
forgive the one phrase which the French chil- 
dren have picked up from our Tommies on ac- 
count of its frequent occurrence — "bl mud." 

I never knew that mud could be so thick and 
treacly. All my fear that I might be afraid un- 
der shell-fire is over — you get to believe that if 
you're going to be hit you're going to be. But 
David's phrase keeps repeating itself in my mind, 
"Ten thousand shall fall at thy side, etc., but it 
shall not come nigh unto thee." It's a curious 
thing that the men who are most afraid are those 
who get most easily struck. A friend of G. M'C.'s 
v-as hit the other day witliin thirty yards of me — " 



48 CARRY ON 

he was a Princeton chap. I mentioned him in 
one of my previous letters. Our right section 
commander got a bhghty two days ago and is 
probably now in England. He went off on a 
firing battery wagon, grinning all over his face, 
saying he wouldn't sell that bit of blood and 
shrapnel for a thousand pounds. I'm wearing 
your tie — it's the envy of the battery. All the 
officers wanted me to give them the name of my 
girl. It never occurs to men that mothers will 
do things like that. 

Thank the powers it has stopped raining and 
we'll be able to get dry. I came in plastered 
from head to foot with lying in the rain on my 
tummy and peering over the top of a trench. 
Isn't it a funny change from comfortable break- 
fasts, press notices and a blazing fire? 

Do you want any German souvenirs? Just at 
present I can get plenty. I have a splendid 
bayonet and a belt with Kaiser Bill's arms on 
it — but you can't forward these things from 
France. The Germans swear that they're not 
using bayonets with saw-edges, but you can buy 
them for five francs from the Tommies — ones 
they've taken from the prisoners or else picked 
up. 

You needn't be nervous about me. I'm a 
great little dodger of whizz-bangs. Besides I 



CARRY ON 49 

have a c^uperstition that there's something in the 
power of M.'s cross to bless. It came with the 
mittens, and is at present round my neck. 

You know what it sounds Hke when they're 
shooting coals down an iron run-way into a 
cellar — well, imagine a thousand of them. 
That's what I'm hearing while I write. 

God bless you; I'm very happy. 
Yours ever, 

Con. 

XIII 

September 19th, 19 16. 

Dearest Father: 

I'm writing you your birthday letter early, 
as I don't know how busy I may be in the next 
week, nor how long this may take to reach you. 
You know how much love I send you and how 
I would like to be with you. D'you remember 
the birthday three years ago when we set the 
victrola going outside your room door? Those 
were my high- jinks days when very many things 
seemed possible. I'd rather be the person I am 
now than the person I was then. Life was 
selfish though glorious. 

Well, I've seen my first modern battlefield and 
am quite disillusioned about the splendour of 
v^ar. The splendour is all in the souls of the 



50 CARRY ON 

men who creep through the squalor Hke ver- 
min — it's in nothing external. There was a chap 
here the other day who deserved the V. C. four 
times over by running back through the Hun 
shell fire to bring news that the infantry wanted 
more artillery support. I was observing for my 
brigade in the forward station at the time. How 
he managed to live through the ordeal nobody 
knows. But men laugh while they do these 
things. It's fine. 

A modem battlefield is the abomination of 
abominations. Imagine a vast stretch of dead 
country, pitted with shell-holes as though it had 
been mutilated with small-pox. There's not a 
leaf or a blade of grass in sight. Every house 
has either been leveled or is in ruins. No bird 
sings. Nothing stirs. The only live sound is 
at night — the scurry of rats. You enter a kind 
of ditch, called a trench ; It leads on to another 
and another in an unjoyful maze. From the 
sides feet stick out, and arms and faces — the 
dead of previous encounters. "One of our 
chaps," you say casually, recognising him by his 
boots or khaki, or "Poor blighter — a Hun!" 
One can afford to forget enmity in the presence 
of the dead. It is horribly difficult sometimes 
to distinguish between the living and the slaugh- 
tered — they both lie so silently in their little ken- 



CARRY ON 51 

nels m the earthen bank. You push on — espe- 
cially if you are doing observation work, till you 
are past your own front line and out in No 
Man's Land. You have to crouch and move 
warily now. Zing! A bullet from a German 
sniper. You laugh and whisper, "A near one, 
that." My first trip to the trenches was up to 
No Man's Land. I went in the early dawn and 
came to a Madame Tussaud's show of the dead, 
frozen into immobility in the most extraordi- 
nary attitudes. Some of them were part way 
out of the ground, one hand pressed to tiie 
wound, the other pointing, the head sunken and 
the hair plastered over the forehead by repeated 
rains. I kept on wondering what my compan- 
ions would look like had they been three weeks 
dead. My imagination became ingeniously and 
vividly morbid. When I had to step over them 
to pass, it seemed as though they must clutch at 
my trench coat and ask me to help. Poor lonely 
people, so brave and so anonymous in their 
death ! Somewhere there is a woman who loved 
each one of them and would give her life for my 
opportunity to touch the poor clay that had been 
kind to her. It's like walking through the day 
of resurrection to visit No Man's Land. Then 
the Huns see you and the shrapnel begins to 
fall — vou crouch like a dog and run for it. 



52 CARRY ON 

One gets used to shell-fire up to a point, but 
there's not a man who doesn't want to duck when 
he hears one coming. The worst of all is the 
whizz-bang, because it doesn't give you a 
chance — it pounces and is on you the same mo- 
ment that it bangs. There's so much I wish that 
I could tell you. I can only say this, at the mo- 
ment we're making history. 

What a curious birthday letter! I think of all 
your other birthdays — the ones before I met 
these silent men with the green and yellow faces, 
and the blackened lips which will never speak 
again. What happy times we have had as a 
family — what happy jaunts when you took me 
in those early days, dressed in a sailor suit, when 
you went hunting pictures. Yet, for all the 
damnability of what I now witness, I was never 
quieter in my heart. To have surrendered to an 
imperative self-denial brings a peace which self- 
seeking never brought. 

So don't let this birthday be less gay for my 
absence. It ought to be the proudest in your 
life — proud because your example has taught 
each of your sons to do the difficult things which 
seem right. It would have been a condemna- 
tion of you if any one of us had been a shirker. 

"I want to buy fine things for yoa 
And be a soldier if I can." 



CARRY ON 53 

The lines come back to me now. You read 
them to me first in the dark little study from a 
green oblong book. You little thought that I 
would be a soldier — even now I can hardly real- 
ise the fact. It seems a dream from which I 
shall wake up. Am I really killing men day by 
day? Am I really in jeopardy myself? 

Whatever happens I'm not afraid, and I'll give 
you reason to be glad of me. 

Very much love, 

Con. 

The poem referred to in this letter was actu- 
ally written for Coningsby when he was between 
five and six years old. The dark little study 
which he describes was in the old house at Wes- 
ley's Chapel, in the City Road, London — and it 
was very dark, with only one window, looking 
out upon a dingy yard. The green oblong book 
in which I used to write my poems I still have; 
and it is an illustration of the tenacity of a child's 
memory that he should recall it. The poem was 
called A Little Boy's Programme, and ran thus ; 

I am so very young and small, 
That, when big people pass me by, 
I sometimes think they are so high 
I'll never be a man at all. 



54 CARRY ON 

And yet I want to be a man 
Because so much I want to do; 
I want to buy fine things for you. 
And be a soldier, if I can. 



When I'm a man I will not let 
Poor little children starve, or be 
Ill-used, or stand and beg of me 
With naked feet out in the wet 



Now, don't you laugh ! — The father kissed 
The little serious mouth and said 
"You've almost made me cry instead. 
You blessed little optimist." 



XIV 

September 21st, 1916. "! 

My Very Dear M. : 

I am wearing your talisman while I write 
and have a strong superstition in its efficacy. 
The efficacy of your socks is also very notice- 
able — I wore them the first time on a trip to the 
Forward Observation Station. I had to lie on 
my tummy in the mud, my nose just showing 
above the parapet, for the best part of twenty- 
four hours. Your socks little thought I would 
take them into such horrid places when you made 
them. 

Last night both the King and Sir Sam sent us 
congratulations — I popped in just at the right 



CARRY ON 55 

time. I daresay you know far more abotit our 
doings than I do. Only this morning I picked 
up the London Times and read a full account of 
everything I have witnessed. The account is 
likely to be still fuller in the New York papers. 
"Home for Christmas" — that's v/hat the Tom- 
mies are promising their mothers and sweet- 
hearts in all their letters that I censor. Yes- 
terday I was offered an Imperial commission in 
the army of occupation. But home for Christ- 
mas, will be Christmas, 19 17 — I can't think that 
it will be earlier. 

Very much love, 

Con. 

XV 

Sunday, September 24th, 1916. 
Dearest Mother: 

Your locket has just reached me, and I 
have strung it round my neck with M.'s cross. 
Was it M.'s cross the other night that accounted 
for my luck? I was in a gun-pit when a shell 
landed, killing a man only a foot away from me 
and wounding three others — I and the sergeant 
were the only two to get out all right. Men 
who have been out here some time have a dozen 
stories of similar near squeaks. And talking of 
squeaks, it was a mouse that saved one man. It 



56 CARRY ON 

kept him awake to such an extent that he detef • 
mined to move to another place. Just as he got 
outside the dug-out a shell fell on the roof. 

You'll be pleased to know that we have a rip- 
ping chaplain or Padre, as they call chaplains, 
with us. He plays the game, and I've struck up 
a great friendship with him. We discuss litera- 
ture and religion when we're feeling a bit fed 
up. We talk at home of our faith being tested — 
one begins to ask strange questions here vhen 
he sees what men are allowed by the Alm.'ghty 
to do to one another, and so it's a fine thirg to 
be in constant touch with a great-hearted chap 
who can risk his life daily to speak of the life 
hereafter to dying Tommies. 

I wish I could tell you of my doings, but it's 
strictly against orders. You may read in the 
papers of actions in which I've taken part and 
never know that I was there. 

We live for the most part on tinned stuff, but 
our appetites make anything taste palatable. 
Living and sleeping in the open air keeps f^e 
ravenous. And one learns to sleep the sleep of 
the just despite the roaring of the guns. 

God bless you each one and give us peace' \\ 
kearts. 

Y'^ours ever, 

Cos. 



CARRY ON 57 

XVI 

September 28th, 1916. 

My Dears: 

We're in the midst of a fine old show, so 
I don't get much opportunity for writing. Suf- 
fice it to say that I've seen the big side of war by 
now and the extraordinary uncalculating cour- 
age of it. Men run out of a trench to an at- 
tack with as much eagerness as they would dis- 
play in overtaking a late bus. If you want to 
get an idea of what meals are like when a row 
is on, order the McAIpin to spread you a table 
where 34th crosses Broadway — and wait for the 
uptown traffic on the Elevated. It's wonderful 
to see the waiters dodging with dishes through 
the shell-holes. 

It's a wonderful autumn day, golden and mel- 
low; I picture to myself what tliis country must 
have looked like before the desolation of war 
struck it. 

I was Brigade observation officer on Septem- 
ber 26th, and wouldn't have missed what I saw 
for a thousand dollars. It was a touch and go 
business, with shells falling everywhere and ma- 
chine-gun fire — but something glorious to re- 
member. I had the great joy of being useful in 



58 CARRY ON 

setting a Hun position on fire. I think the war 
will be over in a twelvemonth. 

Our great joy is composing menus of the 
meals we'll eat when we get home. Good-bye 
for the present. 

Con. 

XVII 

October ist, 1916. 

My Dearest M. : 

Sunday morning, your first back in New- 
ark. You're not up yet owing to the differ- 
ence in time — I can imagine the quiet house with 
the first of the morning stealing greyly in. 
You'll be presently going to church to sit in your 
old-fashioned mahogany pew. There's not 
much of Sunday in our atmosphere — only the 
little one can manage to keep in his heart. I 
shall share the echo of yours by remembering. 

I'm waiting orders at the present moment to 
go forward with the Colonel and pick out a new 
gun position. You know I'm very happy — sat- 
isfied for the first time I'm doing something big 
enough to make me forget all failures and self- 
contempts. I know at last that I can measure 
up to the standard I have always coveted for my- 
self. So don't worry yourselves about any note 
of hardship that you may interpret into my let- 



CARRY ON 59 

ters, for the deprivation is fully compensated for 
by the winged sense of exaltation one has. 

Things have been a little warm round us 
lately. A gun to our right, another to our rear 
and another to our front were knocked out with 
direct hits. We've got some of the chaps tak- 
ing their meals with us now because their mess 
was all shot to blazes. There was an officer who 
was with me at the 53rd blown thirty feet into 
the air while I was watching. He picked him- 
self up and insisted on carrying on, although his 
face was a mass of bruises. I walked in on the 
biggest engagement of the entire war the mo- 
ment I came out here. There was no gradual 
breaking-in for me. My first trip to the front 
line was into a trench full of dead. 

Have you seen Lloyd George's great speech? 
I'm all vv^ith him. No matter what the cost and 
how many of us have to give our lives, this War 
must be so finished that war may be forever at 
an end. H the devils who plan wars could only 
see the abysmal result of their handiwork! 
Give them one day in the trenches under shell- 
fire when their lives aren't worth a five minutes' 
purchase — or one day carrying back the wounded 
through this tortured country, or one day in a 
Red Cross train. No one can imagine the dam- 
nable waste and Christlessness of this battering 



6o CARRY ON 

of human flesh. The only way that this War can 
be made holy is by making it so thorough that 
war will be finished for all time. 

Papa at least will be awake by now. How 
familiar the old house seems to me — I can think 
of the place of every picture. Do you set the 
victrola going now-a-days? I bet you play 
Boys in Khaki, Boys in Blue. 

Please send me anything in the way of eat- 
ables that the goodness of your hearts can imag- 
ine — also smokes. 

Later. 

I came back from the front-line all right and 
have since been hard at it firing. Your letters 
reached me in the midst of a bombardment — I 
read them in a kind of London fog of gun- 
powder smoke, with my steel helmet tilted back, 
in the interval of commanding my section 
through a megaphone. 

Don't suppose that I'm in any way unhappy — 
I'm as cheerful as a cricket and do twice as 
much hopping — I have to. There's something 
extraordinarily bracing about taking risks and 
getting away with it — especially when you know 
that you're contributing your share to a far- 
reaching result. My mother is the mother of a 
soldier now, and soldiers' mothers don't lie 
awake at night imagining — they just say a prayer 



CARRY ON 6i 

for their sons and leave everything in God's 
hands. I'm sure you'd far rather I died than 
not play the man to the fullest of my strength. 
It isn't when you die that matters — it's how. 
Not but what I intend to return to Newark and 
mal<e the house reek of tobacco smoke before 
I've done. 

We're continually in action now, and the casu- 
alty to B. has left us short-handed — moreover 
we're helping out another battery which has lost 
two officers. As you've seen by the papers, 
we've at last got the Hun on the run. Three 
hundred passed me the other day unescorted, 
coming in to give themselves up as prisoners. 
They're the dirtiest lot you ever set eyes on, and 
looked as though they hadn't eaten for months. 
I wish I could send you some souvenirs. But 
we can't send them out of France. 

I'm scribbling by candlelight and everything's 
jumping with the stamping of the guns. I wear 
the locket and cross all the time. 

Yours with much love, 

CoN". 

XVIII 

October 13th, 1916. 
Dear Ones: 

I have only time to write and assure you 
that I am safe. We're living in trenches at pres- 



62 CARRY ON 

ent — I have my sleeping bag placed on a 
stretcher to keep it fairly dry. By the time you 
get this we expect to be having a rest, ^s we've 
been hard at it now for an unusually long time. 
How I wish that I could tell you so many things 
that are big and vivid in my mind — ^but the cen- 
sor ! 

Yesterday I had an exciting day. I was up 
forward when word came through that an officer 
still further forward was wounded and he'd 
been caught in a heavy enemy fire. I had only 
a kid telephonist with me, but we found a 
stretcher, went forward and got him out. The 
earth was hopping up and down like pop-corn 
in a frying pan. The unfortunate thing was 
that the poor chap died on the way out. It was 
only the evening before that we had dined to- 
gether and he had told me what he was going to 
do with his next leave. 

God bless you all, 

Con. 

XIX 

October 14th, 1916. 
Dearest Mother : 

I'm still all right and well. To-day I had 
the funniest experience of my life — got caught 
in a Hun curtain of fire and had to lie on my 



CARRY ON 63 

tummy for two hours in a trench with the shells 
bursting five yards from me — and never a 
scratch. You know how I used to wonder what 
I'd do under such circumstances. Well, I 
laughed. All I could think of was the sleek peo- 
ple walking down Fifth Avenue, and the equally 
sleek crowds taking tea at the Waldorf. It 
struck me as ludicrous that I, who had been one 
of them, should be lying there lunchless. For 
a little while I was slightly deaf with the con- 
cussions. 

That poem keeps on going through my head, 

Oh, to come home once more, when the dusk Is falling, 
To see the nursery lighted and the children's table spread; 

"Mother, mother, mother !" the eager voices calling, 
"The baby was so sleepy that he had to go to bed !" 



Wouldn't it be good, instead of sitting in a 
Hun dug-out? 

Yours lovingly, 

Con. 

XX 

October 15th, 1916. 
Dear Ones: 

We're still in action, but are in hopes that 
soon w^e may be moved to winter quarters. 
We've had our taste of mud, and are anxious to 
move into better quarters before we get our next. 



64 CARRY ON 

I think I told you that our O. C had got 
wounded in the feet, and our right section com- 
mander got it in the shoulder a little earlier— so 
we're a bit short-handed and find ourselves with 
plenty of work. 

I have curiously lucid moments when recent 
happenings focus themselves in what seems to be 
their true perspective. The other night I was 
Forward Observation officer on one of our re- 
cent battlefields. I had to watch the front all 
night for signals, etc. There was a full white 
moon sailing serenely overhead, and when I 
looked at it I could almost fancy myself back in 
the old melancholy pomp of autumn woodlands 
where the leaves were red, not with the colour 
of men's blood. My mind went back to so many 
by-gone days— especially to three years ago. I 
seemed so vastly young then, upon reflection. 
For a little while I was full of regrets for many 
things wasted, and then I looked at the battle- 
field with its scattered kits and broken rifles. 
Nothing seemed to matter very much. A rat 
came out— then other rats. I stood there feel- 
ing extraordinarily aloof from all things that 
can hurt, and— you'll smile— I planned a novel. 
O, if I get back, how differently I shall write! 
When you've faced the worst in so many forms, 



CARRY ON 65 

you lose your fear and arrive at peac/;. There's 
a marvellous grandeur about all this c image and 
desolation — men's souls rise above th< distress — 
they have to in order to survive. Wl en you see 
how cheap men's bodies are you cann it help but 
know that the body is the least part of person- 
ality. 

You can let up on your nervoui less when 
you get this, for I shall almost certai dy be in a 
safer zone. We've done more than our share 
and must be withdrawn soon. The s's hardly 
a battery which does not deservC a dozen 
D. S. O.'s with a V. C. or two thro vn in. 

It's 4.30 now — you'll be in church ^ad, I hope, 
wearing my flowers. Wait till I conJ i back and 
you shall go to church with the biijjest bunch 
of roses that ever were pinned to i feminine 
chest. I wonder when that will be. 

We have heaps of humour out .here. You 
should have seen me this morning, sitting on the 
gun-seat while my batman cut my hair. A sand- 
bag was spread over my shoulders in place of a 
towel and the gun-detachment stood round and 
gave advice. I don't know what I look like, for 
I haven't dared to gaze into my shaving mirror. 
Good luck to us all. 

Con. 



66 CARRY ON 

XXI 

October iSth, 191O. 
Dearest M. : 

I've come down to the lines to-day; to- 
morrow I go back again. I'm sitting alone in 
a deep chalk dug-out — it is 10 p.m. and I have 
lit a fire by splitting wood with a bayonet. 
Your letters from Montreal reached me yester- 
day. They came up in the water-cart when we'd 
all begun to despair of mail. It was wonderful 
the silence that followed while every one went 
back home for a little while, and most of them 
met their best girls. We've fallen into the habit 
of singing in parts. Jerusalem the Golden 
is a great favourite as we wait for our break- 
fast — we go through all our favourite songs, in- 
cluding Poor Old Adam Was My Father. Our 
greatest favourite is one which is symbolising 
the hopes that are in so many hearts on this 
greatest battlefield in history. We sing it un- 
der shell-fire as a kind of prayer, we sing it as 
we struggle knee-deep in the appalling mud, we 
sing it as we sit by a candle in our deep cap- 
tured German dug-outs. It runs like this : 

"There's a long, long trail a-winding 
Into the land of my dreams. 
Where the nightingales are singing 
And a white moon beams : 



CARRY ON 67 

There's a long, long night of waiting 
Until my dreams all come true; 
Till the day when I'll be going down 
That long, long trail with you." 

You ought to be able to get it, and then you will 
be singing it when I'm doing it. 

No, I don't know what to ask from you for 
Christmas — unless a plum pudding and a gen- 
eral surprise box of sweets and food stuffs. If 
you don't mind my suggesting it, I wouldn't a 
bit mind a Christmas box at once — a schoolboy's 
tuck box. I wear the locket, cross, and tie all 
the time as kind of charms against danger — they 
give me the feeling of loving hands going with 
me everywhere. 

God bless you. 

Yours ever, 

Con. 

XXII 

October 23rd, 1916. 
Dearest All: 

As you know I have been in action ever 
since I left England and am still. I've lived in 
various extemporised dwellings and am at pres- 
ent writing from an eight foot deep hole dug in 
the ground and covered over with galvanised 
iron and sand-bags. We have made ourselves 



68 CARRY ON 

very comfortable, and a fire is burning — I cor- 
rect that — comfortable until it rains, I should 
say, when the water finds its own level. We 
have just finished with two days of penetrating 
rain and mist — in the trenches the mud was up 
to my knees, so you can imagine the joy of v/ad- 
ing down these shell-torn tunnels. Good thick 
socks have been priceless. 

You'll be pleased to hear that two days ago 
I was made Right Section Commander — which 
is fairly rapid promotion. It means a good deal 
more work and responsibility, but it gives me a 
contact with the men which I like. 

I don't know when I'll get leave — not for an- 
other two months anyway. It would be ripping 
if I had word in time for you to run over to 
England for the brief nine days. 

I plan novels galore and wonder whether I 
shall ever write them the way I see them now. 
My imagination is to an extent crushed by the 
stupendousness of reality. I think I am changed 
in some stern spiritual way — stripped of flabbi- 
ness. I am perhaps harder — I can't say. That 
I should be a novelist seems unreasonable — it's 
so long since I had my own way in the world 
and met any one on artistic terms. But 1 navj- 
enough ego left to be very interested in my book. 
And by the way, when we're out at the front a«tt 



CARRY ON 69 

the battery wants us to come in they simply 
'phone up the password, "Slaves of Freedom," 
the meaning of which we all understand. 

You are ever in my thoughts, and I pray the 
day may not be far distant when we meet again. 

Con. 

XXIII 

October 27th, 1916. 

Dearest Family: 

All to-day I've been busy registering our 
guns. There is little chance of rest — one would 
suppose that we intended to end the war by spring. 

Two new officers joined our battery from 
England, which makes the work lighter. One 
of them brings the news that D., one of the two 
officers who crossed over from England with me 
and wandered through France with me in search 
of our Division, is already dead. He was a 
corking fellow, and I'm very sorry. He was 
caught by a shell in the head and legs. 

I am still living in a sand-bagged shell-hole 
eight feet beneath the level of the ground. I 
have a sleeping bag with an eider-down inside 
it, for my bed; it is laid on a stretcher, which 
is placed in a roofed-in trench. For meals, 
when there isn't a block on the roads, we do very 
well ; we subscribe pretty heavily to the mess, and 



70 CARRY ON 

have an orticer back at the wagon-Hnes to do our 
purchasing. When we move forward into a new 
position, however, we go pretty short, as roads 
have to be built for the throng of traffic. Most 
of what we eat is tinned — and I never want to 
see tinned salmon again when this war is ended. 
I have a personal servant, a groom and two 
horses — but haven't been on a horse for seven 
weeks on account of being in action. We're all 
pretty fed up with continuous firing and living 
so many hours in the trenches. The way ar- 
tillery is run to-day an artillery lieutenant is 
more in the trenches than an infantryman — the 
only thing he doesn't do is to go over the parapet 
in an attack. And one of our chaps did that 
the other day, charging the Huns with a bar of 
chocolate in one hand and a revolver in the 
other. I believe he set a fashion which will be 
imitated. Three times in my experience I have 
seen the infantry jump out of their trenches 
and go across. It's a sight never to be forgot- 
ten. One time there were machine guns behind 
me and they sent a message to me, asking me to 
lie down and take cover. That was impossible, 
as I was observing for my brigade, so I lay on 
the parapet till the bullets began to fall too close 
for comfort, then I dodged out into a shell-hole 
with the German barrage bursting all around 



CARRY ON 71' 

me, and had a most gorgeous view of a modem 
attack. That was some time ago, so you needn't 
be nervous. 

Have I mentioned rum to you? I never 
tasted it to my knowledge until I came out here. 
We get it served us whenever we're wet. It's 
the one thing which keeps a man alive in the 
winter — you can sleep when you're drenched 
through and never get a cold if you take it. 

At night, by a fire, eight feet underground, 
we sing all the dear old songs. We manage a 
kind of glee — Clementina, The Long, Long Trail, 
Three Blind Mice, Long, Long Ago, Rock of 
Ages. Hymns are quite favourites. 

Don't worry about me; your prayers weave 
round me a mantle of defence. 

Yours with more love than I can write, 

Con, 

XXIV 

October 31st, 1916. 
Hallowe'en. 
Dearest People: 

Once more I'm taking the night-firing and 
so have a chance to write to you. I got letters 
from you all, and they each deserve answers, but 
I have so little time to write. We've been hav- 
ing beastly weather — drowned out of our little 



^2 CARRY ON 

houses below ground, with rivers running through 
our beds. The mud is once more up to our knees 
and gets into whatever we eat. The wonder is 
that we keep healthy — I suppose it's the open air. 
My throat never troubles me and I'm free from 
colds in spite of wet feet. The main disadvan- 
tage is that we rarely get a chance to wash or 
change our clothes. Your ideas of an army with 
its buttons all shining is quite erroneous; we look 
like drunk and disorderlies who have spent the 
night in the gutter — and we have the same in- 
stinct for fighting. 

In the trenches the other day I heard mother's 
Suffolk tongue and had a jolly talk with a chap 
who shared many of my memories. It was his 
first trip in and the Huns were shelling badly, but 
he didn't seem at all upset. 

We're still hard at it and have given up all 
idea of a rest — the only way we'll get one is with 
a blighty. You say how often you tell yourselves 
that the same moon looks down on me; it does, 
but on a scene how different ! We advance over 
old battlefields — everything is blasted. If you 
start digging, you turn up what's left of some- 
thing human. If there were any grounds for su- 
perstition, surely the places in which I have been 
should be ghost-haunted. One never thinks 
about it. For myself I have increasingly the feel- 



CARRY ON 71 

ing that I am protected by your prayers; I tell 
myself so when I am in danger. 

Here I sit in an old sweater and muddy 
breeches, the very reverse of your picture of a 
soldier, and I imagine to myself your receipt of 
this. Our chief interest is to enquire whether 
milk, jam and mail have come up from the wagon- 
lines; it seems a faery-tale that there are places 
where milk and jam can be had for the buying. 
See how simple we become. 

Poor little house at Kootenay ! I bate to think 
of it empty. We had such good times there 
twelve months ago. They have a song here to a 
nursery rhyme lilt, Apres le Guerre Finis; it 
goes on to tell of all the good times we'll have 
when the war is ended. Every night I invent a 
new story of my own celebration of the event, 
usually, as when I was a kiddie, just before I fall 
asleep — only it doesn't seem possible that the war 
will ever end. 

I hear from the boys very regularly. There's 
just the chance that I may get leave to London 
in the New Year and meet them before they set 
out. I always picture you with your heads high 
in the air. I'm glad to think of you as proud 
because of the pain we've made you suffer. 

Once again I shall think of you on Papa's 
birthday. I don't think this will be the saddest 



74 CARRY ON 

he will have to remember. It might have been 
if we three boys had still all been with him. If 
I were a father, I would prefer at all costs that 
my son's should be men. What good comrades 
we've always been, and what long years of happy 
times we have in memory — all the way down 
from a little boy in a sailor-suit to Kootenay! 

I fell asleep in the midst of this. I've now got 
to go out and start the other gun firing. With 
very much love. 

Yours, 



XXV 



Con. 



November ist, 1916, 



My Dearest M. : 

Peace after a storm ! Your letter was not 
brought up by the water-wagon this evening, but 
by an orderly — the mud prevented wheel-traffic. 
I was just sitting down to read it when Fritz be- 
gan to pay us too much attention. I put down 
your letter, grabbed my steel helmet, rushed out 
to see where the shells were falling, and then 
cleared my men to a safer area. (By the way, 
did I tell you that I had been made Right Sec- 
tion Commander?) After about half an hour I 
came back and settled down by a fire made of 
smashed ammunition boxes in a stove borrowed 



CARRY ON 75' 

from a ruined cottage. I'm always ashamed that 
my letters contain so little news and are so un- 
interesting. This thing is so big and dreadful 
that it does not bear putting down on paper. I 
read the papers with the accounts of singing sol- 
diers and other rubbish ; they depict us as though 
we were a lot of hair-brained idiots instead of 
men fully realising our danger, who plod on be- 
cause it's our duty. I've seen a good many men 
killed by now — we all have — consequently the 
singing soldier story makes us smile. We've got 
a big job; we know that we've got to "Carry 
On" whatever happens — so we wear a stern grin 
and go to it. There's far more heroism in the 
attitude of men out here than in the footlight at- 
titude that journalists paint for the public. It 
isn't a singing matter to go on firing a gun when 
gun-pits are going up in smoke within sight of 
you. 

What a terrible desecration war is! You go 
out one week and look through your glasses at a 
green, smiling country — little churches, villages 
nestling among woods, white roads running 
across a green carpet ; next week you see nothing 
but ruins and a country-side pitted with shell- 
holes. All night the machine guns tap like rivet- 
ting machines when a New York sky-scraper is 
in the building. Then suddenly in the night a 



76 CARRY ON 

bombing attack will start, and the sky grows 
white with signal rockets. Orders come in for 
artillery retaliation, and your guns begin to stamp 
the ground like stallions ; in the darkness on every 
side you can see them snorting fire. Then still- 
ness again, while Death counts his harvest ; the 
white rockets grow fainter and less hysterical. 
For an hour there Is blackness. 

My batman consoles himself with singing, 

"Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag, 
And smile, smile, smile." 

There's a lot in his philosophy — it's best to go on 
smiling even when some one who was once your 
pal lies forever silent in his blanket on a 
stretcher. 

The great uplifting thought Is that we have 
proved ourselves men. In our death we set a 
standard which in ordinary life we could never 
have followed. Inevitably we should have sunk 
below our highest self. Here we know that the 
world will remember us and that our loved ones, 
in spite of tears, will be proud of us. What God 
will say to us we cannot guess — but He can't be 
too hard on men who did their duty. I think we 
all feel that trivial former failures are washed out 
by this final sacrifice. When little M. used to 
recite "Breathes there a man with soul so dead, 



CARRY ON 77 

who never to himself had said, This is my own, 
my native land.' " I never thought that I should 
have the chance that has now been given to me. 
I feel a great and solemn gratitude that I have 
been thought worthy. Life has suddenly become 
effective and worthy by reason of its carelessness 
of death. 

By the way, that Princeton man I mentioned so 
long ago was killed forty yards away from me 
on my first trip into the trenches. Probably G. 
IvrC. and his other friends know by now. He 
was the first man I ever saw snuffed out. 

I'm wearing your mittens and find them a great 
comfort. I'll look forward to some more of your 
socks— I can do with plenty of them. If any of 
your friends are making things for soldiers, I 
wish you'd get them to send them to this battery, 
as they would be gratefully accepted by the men! 
I wish I could come to The Music Master with 
you. I wonder how long till we do all those in- 
timately family things together again. 

Good-bye, my dearest M. I live for home let- 
ters and am rarely disappointed. 
God bless you, and love to you all. 
Yours ever, 

Con. 



78 CARRY ON 

XXVI 

November 4th, 1916. 

My Dearest Mother: 

This morning I was wakened up in the 
gunpit where I was sleeping by the arrival of the 
most wonderful parcel of mail. It was really a 
kind of Christmas morning for me. My servant 
had lit a fire in a punctured petrol can and the 
place looked very cheery. First of all entered an 
enormous affair, which turned out to be a stove 
which C. had sent. Then there was a sand-bag 
containing all your gifts. You may bet I made 
for that first, and as each knot was undone re- 
membered the loving hands that had done it up. 
I am now going up to a twenty-four-hour shift 
of observing, and shall take up the malted milk 
and some blocks of chocolate for a hot drink. 
It somehow makes you seem very near to me to 
receive things packed with your hands. When 
I go forward I shall also take candles and a copy 
of Anne Veronica with me, so that if I get a 
chance I can forget time. 

Always when I write to you odds and ends 
come to mind, smacking of local colour. After 
an attack some months ago I met a solitary pri- 
vate wandering across a shell-torn field. I 
watched him and thought something was wrong 



CARRY ON 79 

by the aimlessness of his progress. When 1 
spoke to him, he looked at me mistily and said, 
"Dead men. Moonlit road." He kept on re- 
peating the phrase, and it was all that one could 
get out of him. Probably the dead men and the 
moonlit road were the last sights he had seen be- 
fore he went insane. 

Another touching thing happened two days ago. 
A Major turned up who had travelled fifty miles 
by motor lorries and any conveyance he could 
pick up on the road. He had left his unit to 
come to have a glimpse of our front-line trench 
where his son was buried. The boy had died 
there some days ago in going over the parapet. I 
persuaded him that he ought not to go alone, and 
that in any case it wasn't a healthy spot. At last 
he consented to let me take him to a point from 
which he could see the ground over which his 
son had attacked and led his men. The sun 
was sinking behind us. He stood there very 
straightly, peering through my glasses — and then 
forgot all about me and began speaking to his son 
in childish love-words. "Gone West," they call 
dying out here — we rarely say that a man is dead. 
I found out afterwards that it was the boy's 
mother the Major was thinking of when he 
pledged himself to visit the grave in the front- 
line. 



8o CARRY ON 

But there are happier things than that. For 
instance, you should hear us singing at night in 
our dug-out — every tune we ever learnt, I be- 
lieve. Silver Threads Among the Gold, In the 
Gloaming, The Star of Bethlehem, I Hear You 
Calling Me, interspersed with Everybody Works 
but Father, and Poor Old Adam, etc. 

I wish I could know in time when I get my 
leave for you to come over and meet me. Fm 
going to spend my nine days in the most glorious 
ways imaginable. To start with I won't eat any- 
thing that's canned and, to go on, I won't get out 
of bed till I feel inclined. And if you're 
there ! 

Dreams and nonsense! God bless you all and 
keep us near and safe though absent. Alive or 
"Gone West" I shall never be far from you ; you 
may depend on that — and I shall always hope to 
feel you brave and happy. This is a great 
game — cheese-mites pitting themselves against all 
the splendours of Death. Please, please write 
well ahead, so that I may not miss your Christ- 
mas letters. 

Yours lovingly, 

Con. 



CARRY ON 8i 

xxvir 

November 6th, 1916. 
My Dear Ones : 

Such a wonderful day It has been — I 
scarcely know where to start. I came down last 
night from twenty-four hours in the mud, where 
I had been observing. I'd spent the night in a 
hole dug in the side of the trench and a dead 
Hun forming part of the roof. I'd sat there re- 
living so many things — the ecstatic moments of 
my life when I first touched fame — and my feet 
were so cold that I could not feel them, so I 
thought all the harder of the pleasant things of 
the past. Then, as I say, I came back to the gurt 
position to learn tliat I was to have one day off 
at the back of the lines. You can't imagine what 
that meant to me — one day in a country that is 
green, one day where there is no shell-fire, one 
day where you don't turn up corpses with your 
tread! For two months I have never left the 
guns except to go forward and I have never been 
from under shell-fire. All night long as I have 
slept the ground had been shaken by the stamp- 
ing of the guns — and now after two months, to- 
come back to comparative normality! The rea- 
son for this privilege being granted was that the 
powers that be had come to the conclusion that 



'82 CARRY ON 

it was time I had a bath. Since I sleep in my 
clothes and water is too valuable for washing 
anything but the face and hands, they were prob- 
ably right in their guess at my condition. 

So with the greatest holiday of my life in pros- 
pect I went to the empty gunpit in which I sleep, 
and turned in. This morning I set out early with 
my servant, tramping back across the long, long 
battlefields which our boys have won. The mud 
was knee-deep in places, but we floundered on 
till we came to our old and deserted gun-position 
where my horses waited for me. From there I 
rode to the wagon-lines — the first time I've sat 
a horse since I came into action. Far be- 
hind me the thunder of winged murder grew 
more faint. The countrj'- became greener; trees 
even had leaves upon them which fluttered against 
the grey-blue sky. It was wonderful — like 
awaking from an appalling nightmare. My lit- 
tle beast was fresh and seemed to share my joy, 
for she stepped out bravely. 

When I arrived at the wagon-lines I would not 
wait — I longed to see something even greener and 
quieter. My groom packed up some oats and 
away we went again. My first objective was the 
military baths; I lay in hot water for half-an- 
hour and read the advertisements of my book. 
As I lay there, for the first time since I've be^i 



CARRY ON 83 

out, I began to get a half-way true perspective of 
myself. What's left of the egotism of the author 
came to life, and — now laugh — I planned my next 
novel — planned it to the sound of men singing, 
because they were clean for the first time in 
months. I left my towels and soap with a mili- 
tary policeman, by the roadside, and went pranc- 
ing off along country roads in search of the al- 
most forgotten places where people don't kill one 
another. Was it imagination? There seemed 
to me to be a different look in the faces of the 
men I met — for the time being they were neither 
hunters nor hunted. There were actually cows 
in the fields. At one point, where pollarded trees 
stand like a Hobbema sketch against the sky, a 
group of officers were coursing a hare, following 
a big black hound on horseback. We lost our 
way. A drenching rainstorm fell over us — we 
didn't care; and we saw as we looked back a 
most beautiful thing — a rainbow over green fields. 
It was as romantic as the first rainbow in child- 
hood. 

All day I have been seeing lovely and familiar 
things as though for the first time. I've been a 
sort of Lazarus, rising out of his tomb and prais- 
ing God at the sound of a divine voice. You 
don't know how exquisite a ploughed field can 



84 CARRY ON 

look, especially after rain, unless you have feared 
that you might never see one again. 

I came to a grey little village, where civilians 
were still living, and then to a gate and a garden. 
In the cottage was a French peasant woman who 
smiled, patted my hair because it was curly, and 
chattered interminably. The result was a huge 
omelette and a bottle of champagne. Then came 
a touch of naughtiness — a lady visitor with a 
copy of La Vie Parisienne, which she promptly 
bestowed on the English soldier. I read it, and 
dreamt of the time when I should walk the 
Champs Elysees again. It was growing dusk 
when I turned back to the noise of battle. There 
was a white moon in a milky sky. Motor-bikes 
fled by me, great lorries driven by Jehus from 
London buses, and automobiles which too poign- 
antly had been Strand taxis and had taken lovers 
home from the Gaiety. I jogged along thinking 
very little, but supremely happy. Now I'm back 
at the wagon-line; to-morrow I go back to the 
guns. Meanwhile I write to you by a guttering 
candle. 

Life, how I love you! What a wonderful 
kindly thing I could make of you to-night. 
Strangely the vision has come to me of all that 
you mean. Now I could write. So soon you 



CARRY ON 8s 

may go from me or be changed into a form of 
existence which all my training has taught me 
to dread. After death is there only nothingness? 
I think that for those who have missed love in 
this life there must be compensations — the little 
children whom they ought to have had, perhaps. 
To-day, after so many weeks, I have seen little 
children again. 

And yet, so strange a havoc does this war work 
that, if I have to "Go West," I shall go proudly 
and quietly. I have seen too many men die 
bravely to make a fuss if my turn comes. A 
mixed passenger list old Father Charon must 
have each night — Englishmen, Frenchmen, and 
Huns. To-morrow I shall have another sight 
of the greenness and then — the guns. 

I don't know whether I have been able to make 
any of my emotions clear to you in my letters. 
Terror has a terrible fascination. Up to now I 
have always been afraid — afraid of small fears. 
At last I meet fear itself and it stings my pride 
into an unpremeditated courage. 

I've just had a pile of letters from you all. 
How ripping it is to be remembered! Letters 
keep one civilised. 

It's late and I'm very tired. God bless you 
each and all. 

Con. 



86 CARRY ON 

XXVIII 

November 15th, 1916. ' 

Dear Father: 

I've owed you a letter for some time, but 
I've been getting very little leisure. You can't 
send steel messages to the Kaiser and love-notes 
to your family in the same breath. 

I am amazed at the spirit you three are show- 
ing and almighty proud that you can muster 
such courage. I suppose none of us quite real- 
ised our strength till it came to the test. There 
was a time when we all doubted our own heroism. 
I think we were typical of our age. Every novel 
of the past ten years has been more or less a 
study in sentiment and self-distrust. We used 
to wonder what kind of stuff Drake's men were 
made of that they could jest while they died. 
We used to contrast ourselves with them to our 
own disfavour. Well, we know now that when 
there's a New World to be discovered we can 
still rise up reincarnated into spiritual pirates. 
It wasn't the men of our age who were at fault, 
but the New World that was lacking. Our New 
World is the Kingdom of Heroism, the doors of 
which are flung so wide that the meanest of us 
may enter. I know men out here who are the 
dependable daredevils of their brigades, who in 



CARRY ON 87 

peace times were nuisances and as soon as peace 
is declared will become nuisances again. At the 
moment they're fine, laughing at Death and smil- 
ing at the chance of agony. There's a man I 
know of who had a record sheet of crimes. 
When he was out of action he was always drunk 
and up for office. To get rid of him, they put 
him into the trench mortars and within a month 
he had won his D. C. M. He came out and went 
on the spree — this particular spree consisted in 
stripping a Highland officer of his kilts on a 
moonlight night. For this he was sentenced to 
several months in a mihtary prison, but asked to 
be allowed to serve his sentence in the trenches. 
He came out from his punishment a King's ser- 
geant — which means that whatever he did no- 
body could degrade him. He got this for lifting 
his trench mortar over the parapet when all the 
detachment were killed. Carrying it out into a 
shell-hole, he held back the Hun attack and saved 
the situation. He got drunk again, and again 
chose to be returned to the trenches. This time 
his head was blown off while he was engaged in 
a special feat of gallantry. What are you to say 
to such men ? Ordinarily they'd be blackguards, 
but war lifts them into splendour. In the same 
way you see mild men, timid men, almost girlish 
men, carrying out duties which in other wars 



88 CARRY ON 

would have won V. C.'s. I don't think the soul 
of courage ever dies out of the race any more 
than the capacity for love. All it means is that 
the occasion is not present. For myself I try 
to analyse my emotions ; am I simply numb, or 
do I imitate other people's coolness and shall I 
fear life again when the war is ended? There 
is no explanation save the great army phrase 
''Carry on." We "carry on" because, if we 
don't, we shall let other men down and put their 
lives in danger. And there's more than that — 
we all want to live up to the standard that 
prompted us to come. 

One talks about splendour — but war isn't 
splendid except in the individual sense. A man 
by his own self-conquest can make it splendid 
for himself, but in the massed sense it's squalid. 
There's nothing splendid about a battlefield when 
the fight is ended — shreds of what once were men, 
tortured, levelled landscapes — the barbaric lone- 
liness of Hell. I shall never forget my first dead 
man. He was a signalling officer, lying in the 
dawn on a muddy hill. I thought he was asleep 
at first, but when I looked more closely, I saw 
that his shoulder blade was showing white 
through his tunic. He was wearing black boots. 
It's odd, but the sight of black boots have the 
same effect on me now that black and white 



CARRY ON 89 

stripes had In childhood. I have the supersti- 
tious feehng that to wear them would bring me 
bad luck. 

To-night we've been singing in parts, Back 
in the Dear Dead Days Beyond Recall — a mourn- 
ful kind of ditty to sing under the circum- 
stances — so mournful that we had to have a game 
of five hundred to cheer us up. 

It's now nearly 2 a.m., and I have to go out to 
the guns again before I go to bed. I carry your 
letters about in my pockets and read them at odd 
intervals in all kinds of places that you can't 
imagine. 

Cheer up and remember that I'm quite happy. 
I wish you could be with me for just one day 
to understand. 

Yours, 

Con. 

XXIX 

December 3rd, 1916. 

Dear Boys: 

By this time you will be all through your 
exams and I hope have both passed. It'll be 
splendid if you can go together to the same sta- 
tion. You envy me, you say ; well, I rather envy 
you. I'd like to be with you. You, at least, 
don't have Napoleon's fourth antagonist with 



90 CARRY ON 

which to contend — mud. But at present I'm 
clean and billeted in an estaminet, in a not toe 
bad little village. There's an old mill and still 
older church, and the usual farmhouses with the 
indispensable pile of manure under the front 
windows. We shall have plenty of hard work 
here, licking our men into shape and re-fitting. 

You know how I've longed to sleep between 
sheets; I can now, but find them so cold that I 
still use my sleeping bag — such is human incon- 
sistency. But yesterday I had a boiling bath — 
as good a bath as could be found in a New York 
hotel — and I am CLEAN. 

I woke up this morning to hear some one sing- 
ing Casey Jones — consequently I thought of 
former Christmases. My mind has been travel- 
ling back very much of late. Suddenly I see 
something here which reminds me of the time 
when E. and I were at Lisieux, or even of our 
Saturday excursions to Nelson vv^hen we were all 
together at the ranch. 

Did I tell you that B., our officer who was 
wounded two months ago, has just returned to 
us. This morning he got news that his young 
brother has been killed in the place which we have 
left. I wonder when we shall grow tired of 
stabbing and shooting and killing. It seems to me 
that the war cannot end in less than two years. 



CARRY ON 91 

I have made myself nice to the Brigade in- 
terpreter and he has found me a delightful room 
with electric light and a fire. It's in an old 
farmhouse with a brick terrace in front. My 
room is on the ground floor and tile-paved. The 
chairs are rush-bottomed and there are old quaint 
china plates on the shelves. There is also a 
quite charming mademoiselle. So you see, you 
don't need to pity me any more. 

Just at present I'm busy getting up the Brigade 
Christmas Entertainment. The Colonel asked 
me to do it, otherwise I should have said no, as 
I want all the time I can get to myself. You 
can't think how jolly it is to sit again in a room 
which is temporarily yours after living in dug- 
outs, herded side by side with other men. I can 
be me now, and not a soldier of thousands when 
I write. You shall hear from me again soon. 
Hope you're having a ripping time in London. 
Yours ever, 

Con. 

XXX 

December sth, 1916. 
Dearest M. : 

I've just come in from my last tour of 
inspection as orderly officer, and it's close on 
midnight. I'm getting this line off to you to let 



92 CARRY ON 

you know that I expect to get my nine days* 
leave about the beginning of January. How I 
wish it were possible to have you in London when 
I arrive, or, faihng that, to spend my leave in 
New York! 

To-morrow I make an early start on horse- 
back for a market of the old-fashioned sort which 
is held at a town near by. Can you dimly pic- 
ture me with my groom, followed by a mess- 
cart, going from stall to stall and bartering with 
the peasants ? It'll be rather good fun and some- 
thing quite out of my experience. 

Christmas will be over by the time you get this, 
and I do hope that you had a good one, I paused 
to talk to the other officers; they say that they 
are sure that you are very beautiful and have a 
warm heart, and would like to send them a five- 
storey layer cake, half a dozen bottles of port 
and one Paris chef. At present I am the Dives 
of the mess and dole out luxuries to these Laz- 
aruses. 

Good-bye for the present. 

lYours ever lovingly. 

Con. 



CARRY ON 93 

XXXI 

December 6th, 1916. 

Dearest M. : 

I've just undone your Christmas parcels, 
and already I am wearing the waistcoat and 
socks, and my mouth is hot with the ginger. 

I expect to get leave for England on January 
lOth. I do wish it might be possible for some 
of you to cross the ocean and be in London with 
me — and I don't see what there is to prevent you. 
Unless the war ends sooner than any of us ex- 
pect, it is not likely that I shall get another leave 
in less than nine months. So, if you want to 
come and if there's time when you receive this 
letter, just hop on a boat and let's see what Lx)n- 
don looks like together. 

I wonder what kind of a Christmas you'll have. 
I shall picture it all. You may hear me tiptoeing 
up the stairs if you listen very hard. Where 
does the soul go in sleep? Surely mine flies back 
to where all of you dear people are. 

I came back to my farm yesterday to find a 
bouquet of paper flowers at the head of my bed 
with a note pinned on it. Over my fire-place was 
hung a pathetic pair of farm-girls' heavy Sun- 
day boots, all brightly polished, with two other 
notes pinned on them. The Feast of St. Nicholas 



94 CARRY ON 

on December 7th is an opportunity for wiiTiar- 
ried men to be reminded that there are unmar- 
ried girls in the world — wherefore the flowers 
I enclose the notes. Keep them, — they may be 
useful for a book some day. 

I'm having a pretty good rest, and am still in 
my old farmhouse. 

Love to al! 

XXXII 

December 15th, 1916. 

Dearest All : 

At the present I'm just where mother 
hoped I'd be — in a deep dug-out about twenty 
feet down — we're trying to get a fire lighted, and 
consequently the place is smoked out. Where 
I'll be for Christmas I don't know, but I hope 
by then to be in billets, I've just come back from 
the trenches, where I've been observing. The 
mud is not nearly so bad where I am now, and 
with a few days' more work, we should be quite 
comfortable. You'll have received my cable 
about my getting leave soon — I'm wondering 
whether the Atlantic is sufficiently quiet for any 
of you to risk a crossing. 

Poor Basil ! Your letter was the first news I 
got of his death. I must have watched the at- 



CARRY ON 95 

tack in which he lost his life. One wonders now 
how it was that some instinct did not warn me 
that one of those khaki dots jumping out of the 
trenches was the cousin who stayed with us in 
London. 

I'm wondering what this mystery of the Ger- 
man Chancellor is all about — some peace propo- 
sals, I suppose — which are sure to prove bom- 
bastic and unacceptable. It seems to us out here 
as though the war must go on forever. Like 
a boy's dream of the far-off freedom of man- 
hood, the day appears when we shall step out into 
the old liberty of owning our own lives. What 
a celebration we'll have when I come home! I 
can't quite grasp the joy of it. 

I've got to get this letter off quite soon if it's 
to go to-day. It ought to reach you by January 
1 2th or thereabouts. You may be sure my 
thoughts will have been with you on Christmas 
day. I shall look back and remember all the by- 
gone good times and then plan for Cihristmas, 
1917. God keep us all. 

Ever yours, 

Con. 



96 CARRY ON 

XXXIII 

December i8th, 1916. 

My Dearest M. : 

I always feel when I write a joint letter 
to the family that I'm cheating each one of you, 
but it's so very difficult to get time to write as 
often as I'd like. It's a week to Christmas and 
I picture the beginnings of the preparations. I 
can look back and remember so many such 
preparations, especially when we were kiddies in 
London. What good times one has in a life! 
I've been sitting with my groom by the fire to- 
night while he dried my clothes. I've mentioned 
him to you before as having lived in Nelson, and 
worked at the Silver King mine. We both grew 
ecstatic over British Columbia. 

I am hoping all the time that the boys may be 
in England at the time I get my leave — I hardly 
dare hope that any of you will be there. But 
it would be grand if you could manage it — I long 
very much to see you all again. I can just 
imagine my first month home again. I shan't 
let any of you work. I shall be the incurable 
boy. I've spent the best part of to-day out in 
No Man's Land, within seventy yards of the 
Huns. Quite an experience, I assure you, and 
one that I wouldn't have missed for worlds. I'll 



CARRY ON 97 

have heaps to write into novels one day — the 
vividest kind of local colour. Just at present I 
have nothing to read but the Christmas number 
of the Strand. It makes me remember the time 
when we children raced for the latest develop- 
ment of The Hound of the Baskervilles, and so 
many occasions when I had one of "those sniffy 
colds" and sat by the Highbury fire with a book. 
Good days, those! 

I'm just off to bed now, and will finish this to- 
morrow. Bed is my greatest luxury nowadays. 

December 19th. 

The book and chocolate just came, and a bunch 
of New York papers. All were most welcome. 
I was longing for something to read. To-mor- 
row I have to go forward to observe. Two of 
our officers are on leave, so it makes the rest of 
us work pretty hard. What do you think of 
the Kaiser's absurd peace proposals? The man 
must be mad. 

The best of love, 

Con. 

XXXIV 

December 20th, 1916. 
Dear Mr. T. : 

Just back from a successful argument with 
Fritz, to find your kind good wishes. It's rather 



98 CARRY ON 

a lark out here, though a lark which may turn 
against you any time. I laugh a good deal more 
than I mope. Anything really horrible has a 
ludicrous side — it's like Mark Twain's humour — 
a gross exaggeration. The maddest thing of all 
to me is that a person so willing to be amiable 
as I am should be out here killing people for 
principle's sake. There's no rhyme or reason — 
it can't be argued. Dimly one thinks he sees 
what is right and leaves father and mother and 
home, as though it were for the Kingdom of 
Heaven's sake. Perhaps it is. If one didn't pin 
his faith to that "perhaps" . One can't ex- 
plain. 

A merry Christmas to you. 

Yours very sincerely, 

CoNiNGSBY Dawson. 



XXXV 

December 20th, 1916. 
Dear Mr. A. D. : 

I've just come in from an argument with 
Fritz when your chocolate formed my meal. 
You were very kind to think of me and to send 
it, and you were extraordinarily understanding in 
the letter that you sent me. One's life out here 
is like a pollarded tree — all the lower branches 



CARRY ON 99 

are gone— one gazes on great nobilities, on the 
fascinating horror of Eternity sometimes — I said 
horror, but it's often fine in its spaciousness — 
one gazes on many inverted splendours of Titans, 
but it's giddy work being so high and rarefied, 
and all the gentle past seems gone. That's why 
it is pleasant in this grimy anonymity of death 
and courage to get reminders, such as your letter, 
that one was once localised and had a familiar 
history. If I come back, I shall be like Rip Van 
Winkle, or a Robinson Crusoe — like any and all 
of the creatures of legend and history to whom 
abnormality has grown to seem normal. If you 
can imagine yourself living in a world in which 
every day is a demonstration of a Puritan's con- 
ception of what happens when the last trump 
sounds, then you have some idea of my quee'- 
situation. One has come to a point when death 
seems very inconsiderable and only failure to 
do one's duty is an utter loss. Love and the fu- 
ture, and all the sweet and tender dreams of by- 
gone days are like a house in which the blinds 
are lowered and from which the sight has gone. 
Landscapes have lost their beauty, everything 
God-made and man-made is destroyed except 
man's power to endure with a smile the things 
he once most dreaded, because he believes that 
only so may he be righteous in his own eyes. 



loo CARRY ON 

How one has longed for that sure confidence in 
the petty failings of little living — the confidence 
to believe that he can stand up and suffer for 
principle! God has given all men who are out 
here that opportunity — the supremest that can be 
hoped for — so, in spite of exile, Christmas for 
most of us will be a happy day. Does one see 
more truly life's worth on a battlefield? I often 
ask myself that question. Is the contempt that is 
hourly shown for life the real standard of life's 
worth? I shrug my shoulders at my own un- 
answerable questions — all I know is that I move 
daily with men' who have everything to live for 
who, nevertheless, are urged by an unconscious 
magnanimity to die. I don't think any of our 
dead pity themselves — but they would have done 
so if they had faltered in their choice. One lives 
only from sunrise to sunrise, but there's a more 
real happiness in this brief living than I ever 
knew before, because it is so exactingly worth 
while. 

Thank you again for your kindness. 
Very sincerely yours, 

CD. 

The suggestion that we might all meet in 
London in January, 19 17, was a hope rather 
than an expectation. We received a cable from 



CARRY ON loi 

France on Sunday, December 17th, 1916, and 
left New York on December 30th. We were met 
in London by the two sailor-sons, who were ex- 
pecting appointments at any moment, and Con- 
ingsby arrived late in the evening of January 
13th. He was unwell when he arrived, having 
had a near touch of pneumonia. The day be- 
fore he left the front he had been in action, with 
a tenlperature of 104. There were difficulties 
about getting his leave at the exact time ap- 
pointed, but these he overcame by exchanging 
leave with a brother-officer. He travelled from 
the Front all night in a windowless train, and 
at Calais was delayed by a draft of infantry 
which he had to take over to England. The con- 
sequence of this delay was that the meeting at 
the railway station, of which he had so long 
dreamed, did not come off. We spent a long 
day, going from station to station, misled by im- 
perfect information as to the arrival of troop 
trains. At Victoria Station we saw two thou- 
sand troops arrive on leave, men caked with 
trench-mud, but he was not among them. We 
reluctantly returned to our hotel in the late after- 
noon and gave up expecting him. There was all 
the time a telegram at the hotel from him, giving 
the exact place and time of his arrival, but it 
was not delivered until it was too late to meet 



102 CARRY ON 

him. He arrived at ten o'clock, and at the same 
time his two brothers, who had been summoned 
in the morning to Southampton, entered the hotel, 
having been granted special leave to return to 
London. A night's rest did wonders for Con- 
ingsby, and the next day his spirits were as high 
as in the old days of joyous holiday. During 
the next eight days we lived at a tense pitch of 
excitement. We went to theatres, dined in res- 
taurants, met friends, and heard from his lips a 
hundred details of his life which could not be 
communicated in letters. We were all thrilled 
by the darkened heroic London through which 
we moved, the London which bore its sorrows 
so proudly, and went about its daily life with 
such silent courage. We visited old friends to 
whom the war had brought irreparable bereave- 
ments, but never once heard the voice of self- 
pity, of murmur or complaint. To me it was 
an incredible England ; an England purged of all 
weakness, stripped of flabbiness, regenerated by 
sacrifice. I had dreamed of no such transforma- 
tion by anything I had read in American news- 
papers and magazines. I think no one can 
imagine the completeness of this rebirth of the 
soul of England who has not dwelt, if only for 
a few days, among its people. 

Coningsby's brief leave expired all too soon. 



CARRY ON 103 

We saw him off from Folkestone, and while 
we were saying good-bye to him, his two brothers 
were on their way to their distant appointments 
with the Royal Naval Motor Patrol in the North 
of Scotland. We left Liverpool for New York 
on January 27th, and while at sea heard of the 
diplomatic break between America and Germany. 
The news was received on board the S. S. St. 
Paul with rejoicing. It was Sunday, and the re- 
ligious service on board concluded with the Star- 
Spangled Banner. 

XXXVI 

December 28th, 1916. 

Dearest All: 

I'm writing you this letter because I ex- 
pect to-night is a busy-packing one with you. 
The picture is in my mind of you all. How 
splendid it is of you to come! I never thought 
you would really, not even in my wildest dream 
of optimism. There have been so many times 
when I scarcely thought that I would ever see 
you again — now the unexpected and hoped-for 
happens. It's ripping! 

I've put in an application for special leave in 
case the ordinary leave should be cut off. I think 
I'm almost certain to arrive by the i ith. Won't 
we have a time? I wonder what we'll want to 



I04 CARRY ON 

do most — sit quiet or go to theatres? The nine 
days of freedom — the wonderful nine days — will 
pass with most tragic quickness. But they'll be 
days to remember as long as life lasts. 

Shall I see you standing on the station when 
I puff into London — or will it be Folkestone 
where we meet — or shall I arrive before you? 
I somehow think it will be you who will meet me 
at the barrier at Charing Cross, and we'll taxi 
through the darkened streets down the Strand, 
and back to our privacy. How impossible it 
sounds — like a vision of heart's desire in the 
night. 

Far, far away I see the fine home-coming, like 
a lamp burning in a dark night. I expect we 
shall all go off our heads with joy and be madder 
than ever. Who in the old London days would 
have imagined such a nine days of happiness in 
the old places as we are to have together. 
God bless you, till we meet, 

Con. 

XXXVII 

January 4th, 1917. 
10.30 p.m. 
My Dearest Ones: 

This letter is written to welcome you to 
England, but I may be with you when it is opened. 



CARRY ON 105 

It was glorious news to hear that you were com- 
ing — I was only playing a forlorn bluff when I 
sent those cables. You're on the sea at present 
and should be half way over. Our last trip 
over together you marvelled at the apparent in- 
difference of the soldiers on board, and now 
you're coming to meet one of your own fresh 
from the Front. A change I 

O what a nine days we're going to have to- 
gether — the most wonderful that were ever spent. 
I dream of them, tell myself tales about them, 
live them over many times in imagination be- 
fore they are realised. Sometimes I'm going to 
have no end of sleep, sometimes I'm going to 
keep awake every second, sometimes I'm going 
to sit quietly by a fire, and sometimes I'm going 
to taxi all the time. I can't fit your faces into 
the picture — it seems too unbelievable that we 
are to be together once again. To-day I've been 
staging our meeting — if you arrive first, and then 
if I arrive before you, and lastly if we both hit 
London on the same day. You mustn't expect 
me to be a sane person. You're three rippers to 
do this — and I hope you'll have an easy journey. 
The only ghost is the last day, when the leave 
train pulls out of Charing Cross. But we'll do 
that smiling, too ; C'cst la guerre. 

Yours always and ever, Con. 



io6 CARRY ON 

XXXVIII 

January 6th, 1917. 
My Dk\r Ones: 

I have just seen a brother officer aboard 
the ex-London bus en route for Blighty. How 
I wished I could have stepped on board that ex- 
London perambulator to-night! "Pickerdilly 
Cirkuss, 'Ighbury, 'Ighgate, Welsh 'Arp — all the 
wye." O my, what a time I'll have when I 
meet you! I shall feel as though if anything 
happens to me after my return you'll be able to 
understand so much more bravely. These blink- 
ered letters, with only writing- and no touch of 
live hands, convey so little. When we've had a 
good time together and sat round the fire and 
talked interminably you'll be able to read so 
much more between the lines of my future let- 
ters. To-morrow you ought to land in England, 
and to-morrow night you should sleep in London. 
I am trying to swop my leave with another man, 
otherwise it won't come till the 15th. I am look- 
ing" forward every hour to those miraculous nine 
days which we are to have together. You can't 
imagine with your vividest imagination the con- 
trast between nine days with you in London and 
my days where I am now. A battalion went bv 
yesterday, marching into action, and its band wa? 



CARRY ON 107 

playing I've a Sneakin' Feelin' in My Heart 
That I Want to Settle Down. We all have that 
sneaking feeling from time to time. I tell myself 
wonderful stories in the early dark mornings and 
become the architect of the most wonderful fu- 
tures. 

I'm coming to join you just as soon as I 
know how — at the worst I'll be in London on the 
1 6th of this month. 

Ever yours, 

Con. 

The follozving letters were written after Con- 
ingshy had met his family in London. 

XXXIX 

January 24th, 19 17. 

My Dear Ones : 

I have had a chance to write you sooner 
than I expected, as I stopped the night where I 
disembarked, and am catching my train to-day. 

It's strange to be back and under orders after 
nine days' freedom. Directly I landed I was de- 
tailed to march a party — it was that that made me 
lose my train — not that I objected, for I got one 
more sleep between sheets. I picked up on the 
boat in the casual way one does, with three other 



io8 CARRY ON 

officers, so on landing we made a party to dine 
together, and had a very decent evening. I 
wasn't wanting to remember too much then, so 
that was why I didn't write letters. 

What good times we have to look back on 
and how much to be thankful for, that we met 
altogether. Now we must look forward to the 
summer and, perhaps, the end of the war. What 
a mad joy will sweep across the world on the 
day that peace is declared! 

This visit will have made you feel that you 
have a share in all that's happening over here 
and are as real a part of it as any of us. I'm 
Awfully proud of you for your courage. 
Yours lovingly, 

Con. 

XL 

January 26th, 1917. 
My Very Dear Ones : 

Here I am back — my nine days' leave a 
dream. I got into our wagon-lines last night 
after midnight, having had a cold ride along 
frozen roads through white wintry country. I 
was only half -expected, so my sleeping-bag hadn't 
been unpacked. I had to wake my batman and 
tramp about a mile to the billet; by the time I 
got there every one was asleep, so I spread out 



CARRY ON 109 

my sleeping-sack and crept in very quietly. For 
the few minutes before my eyes closed I pic- 
tured London, the taxis, the gay parties, the mys- 
tery of lights. I was roused this morning with 
the news that I had to go up to the gun-position 
at once. I stole just sufficient time to pick up a 
part of my accumulated mail, then got on my 
horse and set out. At the guns, I found that I 
was due to report as liaison officer, so here I am 
in the trenches again writing to you by candle- 
light. How wonderfully we have bridged the 
distance in sj>ending those nine whole days to- 
gether. And now it is over, and I am back in the 
trenches, and to-morrow you're sailing for New 
York. 

I can't tell you what the respite has meant to 
me. There have been times when my whole past 
life has seemed a myth and the future an endless 
prospect of carrying on. Now I can distantly 
hope that the old days will return. 

When I was in London half my mind was at 
the Front ; now that I'm back in the trenches half 
my mind is in London. I re-live our gay times 
together; I go to cosy little dinners; I sit with 
you in the stalls, listening to the music; then I 
tumble off to sleep, and dream, and wake up to 
find the dream a delusion. It's a fine and 



no CARRY ON 

manly contrast, however, between the game one 
plays out here and the fretful trivialities of 
civilian life. 

XLI 

January 27th. 

I got as far as this and then "something" hap- 
pened. Twenty- four hours have gone by and 
once more it's nearly midnight and I write to you 
by candle-light. Since last night I've been with 
these infantry boy-officers who are doing such 
great work in such a careless spirit of jolliness. 
Any softness which had crept into me during my 
nine days of happiness has gone. I'm glad to be 
out here and wouldn't wish to be anywhere else 
till the war is ended. 

It's a week to-day since we were at Charlie's 
Aunt — such a cheerful little party ! I expect the 
boys are doing their share of remembering too 
somewhere on the sea at present. I know you 
are, as you round the coast of Ireland and set 
out for the Atlantic. 

I've not been out of my clothes for three days 
and I've another day to go yet. I brought my 
haversack into the trenches with me; on open- 
ing it I found that some kind hands had slipped 
into it some clean socks and a bottle of Horlick's 
Malted Milk tablets. 



CARRY ON III 

The signallers in a near-by dug-out are sing- 
ing Keep the Home-Fires Burning Till the Boys 
Come Home. That's what we're all doing, 
isn't it — you at your end and we at ours? The 
brief few days of possessing myself are over and 
once more stern duty lies ahead. But I thank God 
for the chance I've had to see again those whom 
I love, and to be able to tell them with my own 
lips some of the bigness of our life at the Front. 
No personal aims count beside the great privilege 
which is ours to carry on until the war is over. 

All my thoughts are with you — so many memo- 
ries of kindness. I keep on picturing things I 
ought to have done — things I ought to have 
told you. Always I can see. Oh, so vividly, 
the two sailor brothers waving good-bye as 
the train moved off through the London dusk, 
and then that other and forlorner group of 
three, standing outside the dock gates with 
the sentrv' like the angel in Eden, turning them 
back from happiness. With an extraordinary 
aloofness I watched myself moving like a pup- 
pet away from you whom I love most dearly 
in all the world — going away as if going were a 
thing so usual. 

I'm asking myself again if there isn't some 
new fineness of spirit which will develop from 
tb'*'^ war and survive it. In London, at a dis- 



112 CARRY ON 

tance from all this tragedy of courage, I felt that 
I had slipped back to a lower plane; a kind of 
flabbiness was creeping into my blood — the old 
selfish fear of life and love of comfort. It's odd 
that out here, where the fear of death should 
supplant the fear of life, one somehow rises into 
a contempt for everything which is not bravest. 
There's no doubt that the call for sacrifice, and 
perhaps the supreme sacrifice, can transform men 
into a nobility of which they themselves are un- 
conscious. That's the most splendid thing of 
all, that they themselves are unaware of their 
fineness. 

I'm now waiting to be relieved and am hurry- 
ing to finish this so that I may mail it as soon 
as I get back to the battery. There's a whole 
sack of letters and parcels waiting for me there, 
and I'm as eager to get to them as a kiddy to 
inspect his Christmas stocking. I always undo 
the string and wrappings with a kind of rever- 
ence, trying to picture the dear kneeling figures 
who did them up. In Lx)ndon I didn't dare to 
let myself go with you — I couldn't say all that 
was in my heart — it wouldn't have been wise. 
Don't ever doubt that the tenderness was there. 
Even though one is only a civilian in khaki, some 
oi the soldier's sternness becomes second nature. 

All the country is covered with snow — it's bril- 



CARRY ON 113 

lifiBt clear weather, more like America than 
Euro^pe. I'm feeling strong as a horse, ever so 
much better than I felt when on leave. Life is 
really tremendously worth living, in spite of the 
war. 

XLII 

January 28th. 

I'm back at the battery, sitting by a cosy fire. 
I might be up at Kootenay by the look of my 
surroundings. I'm in a shack with a really truly 
floor, and a window looking out on moonlit white- 
ness. If it wasn't for the tapping of the distant 
machine guns — tapping that always sounds to me 
like the nailing up of coffins — I might be here 
for pleasure. In imagination I can see your 
great ship, with all its portholes aglare, plough- 
ing across the darkness to America. The dear 
sailor brothers I can't quite visualise; I can only 
see them looking so upright and pale when we 
said good-bye. It's getting late and the fire's 
dying. I'm half asleep; I've not been out of my 
clothes for three nights. I shall tell myself a 
story of the end of the war and our next meet- 
ing — it'll last from the time that I creep into my 
sack until I close my eyes. It's a glorious life. 
Yours very lovingly, 

Con 



114 CARRY ON 

XLIII 

January 31st, 1917. 

Dear Mr. and Mrs. M. : 

It was extremely good of you to remem- 
ber me. I got back from leave in London on 
the 26th and found the cigarettes waiting for 
me. One hasn't got an awful lot of pleasures 
left, but smoking is one of them. I feel par- 
ticularly doggy when I open my case and find 
my initials on them. 

I expect you'll have heard all the news of my 
leave long before this reaches you. We had a 
splendid time and the greatest of luck. My 
sailor brothers were with me all but two days, 
and my people were in England only a few days 
before I arrived. 

This is a queer adventure for a peaceable per- 
son like myself — it blots out all the past and re- 
duces the future to a speck. One hardly hopes 
that things will ever be different, but looks for- 
ward to interminable years of carrying on. My 
leave rather corrected that frame of mind ; it came 
as a surprise to be forced to realise that not all 
the world was living under orders on woman- 
less, childless battlefields. But we don't need 
any pity — we manage our good times, and are 
sorry for the men who aren't here, for it's a 



CARRY ON 115 

wonderful thing to have been chosen to sacrifice 
and perhaps to die that the world of the future 
may be happier and kinder. 

This letter is rather disjointed; I'm in charge 
of the battery for the time, and messages keep 
on coming in, and one has to rush out to give 
the order to fire. 

It's an American night — snow-white and pierc- 
ing, with a frigid moon sailing quietly. I think 
the quiet beauty of the sky is about the only 
thing in Nature that we do not scar and destroy 
with our fighting. 

Good-bye, and thank you ever so much. 
Yours very sincerely, 

CoNiNGSBY Dawson. 



XLIV 

February ist, 1917. 
II p.m. 
Dear Father: 

Your picture of the black days when no 
letter comes from me sets me off scribbling to 
you at this late hour. All to-day IVe been hav- 
ing a cold but amusing time at the O. P. (For- 
ward Observation Post). It seems brutal to say 
it, but taking potshots at the enemy when they 
present themselves is rather fun. When you 



ii6 CARRY ON 

watch them scattering like ants before the shell 
^hose direction you have ordered, you somehow 
Corget to think of them as individuals, any more 
than the bear-hunter thinks of the cubs that will 
be left motherless. You watch your victims 
through your glasses as Grod might watch his 
mad universe. Your skill in directing fire makes 
you what in peace times would be called a mur- 
derer. Curious! You're glad, and yet at close 
quarters only in hot blood would you hurt a man. 
I'd been back for a little over an hour when 
I had to go forward again to guide in some gun?. 
The country was dazzlingly white in the moon- 
light. As far as eye could see every yard was 
an old battlefield; beneath the soft white fleece 
of snow lay countless unburied bodies. Like 
frantic fingers tearing at the sky, all along the 
horizon, Hun lights were shooting up and drifting 
across our front. Tap-tap-tappity went the ma- 
chine-guns; whoo-oo went the heavies, and they 
always stamp like angry bulls. I had to come 
back by myself across the heroic corruption which 
the snow had covered. All the way I asked my- 
self why was I not frightened. What has hap- 
pened to me? Ghosts should walk here if any- 
where. Moreover, I know that I shall be fright- 
ened again when the war is ended. Do you re- 
member how you once offered me money to walk 



CARRY ON 117 

through the Forest of Dean after dark, and I 
wouldn't? I wouldn't if you offered it to me 
now. You remember Meredith's lines in "The 
Woods of Westermain" : 

"All the eyeballs under hoods 
Shroud you in their glare; 
Enter these enchanted woods 
You who dare." 

Maybe what re-creates one for the moment is the 
British officer's uniform, and even more the fact 
that you are not asked, but expected, to do your 
duty. So I came back quite unruffled across bat- 
tered trenches and silent mounds to write this 
letter to you. 

My dear father, I'm over thirty, and yet just 
as much a little boy as ever. I still feel over- 
whelmingly dependent on your good opinion and 
love, I'm glad that they are black days when 
you have no letters from me. I love to think 
of the rush to the door when the postman rings 
and the excited shouting up the stairs, "Quick, 
one from Coru" 

February 2nd. 

You sec by the writing how tired I was when 
I reached this point. It's nearly twenty-four 
hours later and again night. The gramophone is 
playing an air from La Tosca to which the guns 



n8 CARRY ON 

beat out a bass accompaniment. I close my eyes 
and picture the many times I have heard the 
Cprobably) German orchestras of Broadway Joy 
Palaces fjlay that same music. How incongru- 
ous that 1 should be listening to it here and un- 
der these circumstances! It must have been 
listened to so often by gay crowds in the beauty 
places of the world. A romantic picture grows 
up in my mind of a blue night, the laughter of, 
youth in evening dress, lamps twinkling through 
trees, far off the velvety shadow of water and 
mountains, and as a voice to it all, that air from 
La Tosca. 1 can lx;lieve that the silent pef>ple 
near by raise themselves up in their snow-beds 
to listen, each one recalling some ecstatic mo- 
ment before the dream of life was shattered. 

There's a picture in the Pantheon at Paris, I 
rememljcr; I believe it's called To Glory. One 
sees all the armies of the ages charging out of 
the middle distance with Death riding at their 
head. The only glory that I have discovered in 
this war is in men's hearts — it's not external. 
Were one to paint the spirit of this war he would 
dejiict a mud landscajK', blasted trees, an iron sky; 
wading through the slush and shell-holes would 
come a file of bowed figures, more like outcasts 
from the Embankment than soldiers. They're 
loaded down like pack animals, their shoulders 



CARRY ON 119 

are rounded, they're wearied to death, but they 
go on and go on. There's no "To Glory" about 
what we're doing out here; there's no flash of 
swords or splendour of uniforms. There are 
only very tired men determined to carry on. The 
war will be won by tired men who could never 
again pass an insurance test, a mob of broken 
counter-jumpers, ragged ex-plumbers and quite 
unheroic persons. We're civilians in khaki, but 
because of the ideals for which we fight we've 
managed to acquire soldiers' hearts. 

My flow of thought was interrupted by a burst 
of song in which I was compelled to join. We're 
all writing letters around one candle; suddenly 
the O. C. looked up and began, God Be With 
You Till We Meet Again. We sang it in parts. 
It was in Southport, when I was about nine years 
old, that I first heard that sung. You had gone 
for your first trip to America, leaving a very 
lonely family behind you. We children were 
scared to death that you'd be drowned. One eve- 
ning, coming back from a walk on the sand-hills, 
we heard voices singing in a garden, God Be 
With You Till We Meet Again. The words and 
the soft dusk, and the vague figures in the English 
summer garden, seemed to typify the terror of 
all partings. We've said good-bye so often since, 
and God has been with us. I don't think any 



I20 CARRY ON 

parting was more hard than our last at the pro* 
saic dock-gates with the cold wind of duty blow- 
ing, and the sentry barring your entrance, and 
your path leading back to America while mine 
led on to France. But you three were regular 
soldiers — just as much soldiers as we chaps who 
were embarking. One talks of our armies in 
the field, but there are the other armies, mil- 
lions strong, of mothers and fathers and sisters, 
who keep their eyes dry, treasure muddy letters 
beneath their pillows, ojfTer up prayers and wait, 
wait, wait so eternally for God to open another 
door. 

To-morrow I again go forward, which means 
rising early and taking a long plod through the 
snows; that's one reason for not writing any 
more, and another is that our one poor candle 
is literally on its last legs. 

Your poem, written years ago when the poor 
were marching in London, is often in my mind : 

"Yesterday and to-day- 
Have been heavy with labour and sorrow; 
I should faint if I did not see 
The day that is after to-morrow." 

And there's that last verse which prophesied ut- 
terly the spirit in which we men at the Front are 
fighting to-day: 



CARRY ON 121 

"And for me, with spirit elate 

The mire and the fog I press thorough. 
For Heaven shines under the cloud 
Of the day that is after to-morrow." 

We civilians who have been taught so long to 
love our enemies and do good to them who hate 
us — much too long ever to make professional 
soldiers — are watching with our hearts in our 
eyes for that day which comes after to-morrow. 
Meanwhile we plod on determinedly, hoping for 
the hidden glory. 

Yours very lovingly. 

Con. 

XLV 

February 3rd, 1917. 

Dear Misses W. : 

You were very kind to remember me at 
Christmas. Seventeen was read with all kinds 
of gusto by all my brother officers. It's still be- 
ing borrowed. 

I've been back from leave a few days now and 
am settling back to business again. It was a 
trifle hard after over-eating and undersleeping 
myself for nine days, and riding everywhere with 
my feet up in taxis. I was the wildest little boy. 
Here it's snowy and bitter. We wear scarves 
round our ears to keep the frost away and dream 



122 CARRY ON 

of fires a mile high. All I ask, when the war is 
ended, is to be allowed to sit asleep in a big arm- 
chair and to be left there absolutely quiet. Sleep, 
which we crave so much at times, is only death 
done up in sample bottles. Perhaps some of 
these very weary men who strew our battlefields 
are glad to lie at last at endless leisure. 
Good-bye, and thank you. 

Yours very sincerely. 

Con. 

XLVI 

February 4th, 1917. 
My Dearest Mother: 

Somewhere in the distance I can hear a 
piano going and men's voices singing A Perfect 
Day. It's queer how music creates a world 
for you in which you are not, and makes you 
dreamy. I've been sitting by a fire and think- 
ing of all the happy times when the total of de- 
sire seemed almost within one's grasp. It never 
is — one always, always misses it and has to rub 
the dust from the eyes, recover one's breath and 
set out on the search afresh. I suppose when 
you grow very old you learn the lesson of sitting 
quiet, and the heart stops beating and the total 
of desire comes to you. And yet I can remem- 
ber so many happy days, when I was a child in 



CARRY ON 123 

the summer and later at Kootenay. One almost 
thought he had caught the secret of carrying 
heaven in his heart. 

By the time this reaches you I'll be in the line 
again, but for the present I'm undergoing a spe- 
cial course of training. You can't hear the most 
distant sound of guns, and if it wasn't for the 
pressure of study, similar to that at Kingston, 
one would be very rested. 

Sunday of all days is the one when I remem- 
ber you most. You're just sitting down to mid- 
day dinner, — I've made the calculation for dif- 
ference of time. You're probably saying how 
less than a month ago we were in London. That 
doesn't sound true even when I write it. I won- 
der how your old familiar surroundings strike 
you. It's terrible to come down from the moun- 
tain heights of a great elation like our ten days 
in London. I often think of that with regard to 
myself when the war is ended. There'll be a 
sense of dissatisfaction when the old lost com- 
forts are regained. There'll be a sense of low- 
ered manhood. The stupendous terrors of Ar- 
mageddon demand less courage than the unevent- 
ful terror of the daily commonplace. There's 
something splendid and exhilarating in going for- 
ward among bursting shells — we, who have done 
all that, know that when the guns have ceased to 



124 CARRY ON 

roar our blood will grow more sluggish and well 
never be such men again. Instead of getting up 
in the morning and hearing your O. C. say, 
"You'll run a line into trench so-and-so to-day 
and shoot up such-and-such Hun wire," you'll 
hear necessity saying, "You'll work from break- 
fast to dinner and earn your daily bread. And 
you'll do it to-morrow and to-morrow and to- 
morrow world without end. Amen." They 
never put that forever and forever part into their 
commands out here, because the Amen for any 
one of us may be only a few hours away. But 
the big immediate thing is so much easier to do 
than the prosaic carrying on without anxiety — 
which is your game. I begin to understand what 
you have had to suffer now that R. and E. 
are really at war too. I get awfully anxious 
about them. I never knew before that either of 
them owned so much of my heart. I get furious 
when I remember that they might get hurt. 
I've heard of a Canadian who joined when he 
learnt that his best friend had been murdered 
by Hun bayonets. He came to get his own back 
and was the most reckless man in his battalion. 
I can understand his temj>er now. We're all of 
us in danger of slipping back into the worship 
of Thor. 

I'll write as often as I can while here, but J 



CARRY ON 125 

don't get much time — so you'll understand. It's 
the long nights when one sits up to take the firing 
in action that give one the chance to be a decent 
correspondent. 

My birthday comes round soon, doesn't it? 
Good heavens, how ancient I'm getting and with- 
out any "grow old along with me" consolation. 
Well, to grow old is all in the job of living. 

Good-bye, and God bless you alL 
Yours ever, 

XLVII 

February 4th, 1917. 

Dear Mr. B. : 

I have been intending to write to you for 
a very long time, but as most of one's writing 
is done when one ought to be asleep, and sleep 
next to eating is one of our few remaining pleas- 
ures, my intended letter has remained in my head 
up to now. On returning from a nine days' 
leave to London the other day, however, I found 
two letters from you awaiting me and was re- 
proached into effort. 

War's a queer game — not at all what one's 
civilian mind imagined ; it's far more horrible and 
less exciting. The horrors which the civiliaa 
mind dreads most are mutilation and death. Out 



126 CARRY ON 

here we rarely think about them ; the thing which 
wears on one most and calls out his gravest cour- 
age is the endless sequence of physical discom- 
fort. Not to be able to wash, not to be able to 
sleep, to have to be wet and cold for long periods 
at a stretch, to find mud on your person, in your 
food, to have to stand in mud, see mud, sleep in 
mud and to continue to smile — that's what tests 
courage. Our chaps are splendid. They're not 
the hair-brained idiots that some war-correspond- 
ents depict from day to day. They're perfectly 
sane people who know to a fraction what they're 
up against, but who carry oh with a grim good- 
nature and a determination to win with a smile. 
I never before appreciated as I do to-day the 
latent capacity for big-hearted endurance that is 
in the heart of every man. Here are apparently 
quite ordinary chaps — chaps who washed, liked 
theatres, loved kiddies and sweethearts, had a 
zest for life — they're bankrupt of all pleasures 
except the supreme pleasure of knowing that 
they're doing the ordinary and finest thing of 
which they are capable. There are millions to 
whom the mere consciousness of doing their duty 
has brought an heretofore unexperienced peace 
of mind. For myself I was never happier than 
I am at present ; there's a novel zip added to life 
by the daily risks and the knowledge that at last 



CARRY ON 127 

you're doing something into which no trace of 
selfishness enters. One can only die once; the 
chief concern that matters is how and not when 
you die. I don't pity the weary men who have 
attained eternal leisure in the corruption of our 
shell- furrowed battles; they "went West" in their 
supreme moment. The men I pity are those who 
could not hear the call of duty and whose con- 
sciences will grow more flabby every day. With 
the brutal roar of the first Prussian gun the 
cry came to the civilised world, "Follow thou 
me," just as truly as it did in Palestine. Men went 
to their Calvary singing Tipperary, rubbish, 
rhymed doggerel, but their spirit was equal to 
that of any Christian martyr in a Roman amphi- 
theatre. "Greater love hath no man than this, 
that he lay down his life for his friend." Our 
chaps are doing that consciously, willingly, al- 
most without bitterness towards their enemies; 
for the rest it doesn't matter whether they sing 
hymns or ragtime. They've followed their 
ideal — freedom — and died for it. A former age 
expressed itself in Gregorian chants ; ours, no less 
sincerely, disguises its feelings in ragtime. 

Since September I have been less than a month 
out of action. The game doesn't pall as time 
goer on — it fascinates. We've got to win so that 
men may never again be tortured by the ingenious 



128 GARRY ON 

inquisition of modem warfare. The winning of 
the war becomes a personal affair to the chaps 
who are fighting. The world which sits behind 
the lines, buys extra specials of the daily papers 
and eats three square meals a day, will never 
know what this other world has endured for its 
safety, for no man of this other world will have 
the vocabulary in which to tell. But don't for 
a moment mistake me — we're grimly happy. 

What a serial I'll write for you if I emerge 
from this turmoil! Thank God, my outlook is 
all altered. I don't want to live any longer — 
only to live well. 

Good-bye and good luck. 
Yours, 

CoNiNGSBY Dawson. 



XLVIII 

February 5th, 1917. 

My Dearest Mother : 

Aren't the papers good reading now-a- 
days with nothing to record but success? It 
gives us hope that at last, anyway before the year 
is out, the war must end. As you know, I am at 
the artillery school back of the lines for a month, 
taking an extra course. I have been meeting a 
great many young officers from all over tlie world 



CARRY ON 129 

and have listened to them discussing their pro- 
gram for when peace is declared. Very few of 
them have any plans or prospects. Most of them 
had just started on some course of professional 
training to which they won't have the energy to 
go back after a two years' interruption. The 
question one asks is how will all these men be re- 
absorbed into civilian Ufe. I'm afraid the result 
will be a vast host of men with promising pasts 
and highly uncertain futures. We shall be a holi- 
day world without an income. I'm afraid the 
hero-worship attitude will soon change to im- 
patience when the soldiers beat their swords into 
ploughshares and then confess that they have 
never been taught to plough. That's where I 
shall score — by beating my sword into a pen. 

But what to write about ! Everything will 

seem so little and inconsequential after seeing 
armies marching to mud and death, and people 
will soon get tired of hearing about that. It 
seems as though war does to the individual what 
it does to the landscapes it attacks— obliterates 
everything personal and characteristic. A valley, 
when a battle has done with it, is nothing but 
earth — exactly what it was when God said, "Let 
there be Light;" a man just something with a 
mind purged of the past and ready to observe 
afresh. I question whether a return to old en- 



I30 CARRY ON 

vironments will ever restore to us the whole of 
our old tastes and affections. War is, I think, 
utterly destructive. It doesn't even create cour- 
age — it only finds it in the soul of a man. And 
yet there is one quality which will survive the 
war and help us to face the temptations of peace 
— that same courage which most of us have un- 
consciously discovered out here. 

Well, my dear, I have little news — at least, 
none that I can tell. I'm just about recovered 
from an attack of "flu." I want to get thoroughly 
rid of it before I go back to my battery. I hope 
you all keep well. God bless you all. 
Yours ever, 

Con. 

XLIX 

February 6th, 1917. 
My Very Dear M. : 

I read in to-day's paper that U. S. A. 
threatens to come over and help us. I wish 
she would. The very thought of the possibility 
fills me with joy. I've been light-headed all day. 
It would be so ripping to live among people, 
when the war is ended, of whom you need not 
be ashamed. Somewhere deep down in my heart 
I've felt a sadness ever since I've been out here, 
at America's lack of gallantry — it's so easy to 



CARRY ON 131 

find excuses for not climbing to Calvary ; sacri- 
fice was always too noble to be sensible. I 
would like to see the country of our adoption be- 
come splendidly irrational even at this eleventh 
hour in the game; it would redeem her in the 
world's eyes. She doesn't know what she's 
losing. From these carcase-strewn fields of 
khaki there's a cleansing wind blowing for the 
nations that have died. Though there was only 
one Englishman left to carry on the race when 
this war is victoriously ended, I would give more 
for the future of England than for the future of 
America with her ninety millions whose sluggish 
blood was not stirred by the call of duty. It's 
bigness of soul that makes nations great and not 
population. Money, comfort, limousines and 
ragtime are not the requisites of men when 
heroes are dying. T hate the thought of Fifth 
Avenue, with its pretty faces, its fashions, its 
smiling frivolity. America as a great nation will 
die, as all coward civilisations have died, unless 
she accepts the stigmata of sacrifice, which a 
divine opportunity again offers her. 

If it were but possible to show those ninety 
millions one battlefield with its sprawling dead, 
its pity, its marvellous forgetfulness of self, I 
think then — no, they wouldn't be afraid. Fear 
isn't the emotion one feels — they would ex- 



132 CARRY ON 

p€rience the shame of living when so many have 
shed their youth freely. This war is a pro- 
longed moment of exultation for most of us — 
we are redeeming ourselves in our own eyes. 
To lay down one's life for one's friend once 
seemed impossible. All that is altered. We lay 
down our lives that the future generations may 
be good and kind, and so we can contemplate 
oblivion with quiet eyes. Nothing that is noblest 
that the Greeks taught is unpractised by the 
simplest men out here to-day. They may die 
childless, but their example will father the imagi- 
nation of all the coming ages. These men, in 
the noble indignation of a great ideal, face a 
worse hell than the most ingenious of fanatics 
ever planned or plotted. Men die scorched like 
moths in a furnace, blown to atoms, gassed, tor- 
tured. And again other men step forward to 
take their places well knowing what will be their 
fate. Bodies may die, but the spirit of England 
grows greater as each new soul speeds upon its 
way. The battened souls of America wifl die and 
be buried. I believe the decision of the next 
few days will prove to be the crisis in America's 
nationhood. If she refuses the pain which will 
save her, the cancer of self-despising will rob her 
of her life. 



CARRY ON 133 

This feeling is strong with us. It's past mid- 
night, but I could write of nothing else to-night 
God bless you. 

Yours ever. 

Con. 



AMERICA AND OTHER POEMS 

BY 

W. J. DAWSON 



"The poem which gives title bids fair to become a patri- 
otic classic." — Newark Evening Star. 

"There are many moods in these poems, dramatic, ten- 
der, grave, idealistic." — The CatUitieni. 

"Charm of description allied with rh>lhm and a free 
fancy characterize 'America and Other Poems.' " — Detroit 
Free Press. 

"The simplicity of sincerity, with musical metres and 
fitness of word choice, make 'America and Other Poems, 
noteworthy among the new books of verse." — New York 
Sun. 

"Dr. Dawson has force and grace and a fine command 
of the narrative manner. With the simplest words he can 
paint an unforgettable picture and make the reader lit- 
erally feel the suffering which has inspired some of his 
finest efforts." — San Francisco Chro7iicle. 

"There is poetry in every page dependent not so much 
on graceful and potent phrase and rhythm — though of 
these there is no lack — as in a vigor of thought and ex- 
pression direct enough to enlist ready and confident belief. 
The lines ring true; they sink deep into the spirit and the 
understanding." — Hartford Courant. 

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